Artist-facing music business software is far behind Silicon Valley

I’m a pianist/composer working full-time as a software engineer, and, like many other musicians, regularly utilize a wide range of tech tools to release original music, view my streaming analytics and ensure collection of the resulting royalties in the U.S.

Time and time again, I can’t help but wonder what these companies’ software products would look like if they invested more engineering talent behind them. From a usability standpoint, most artist-facing software in the music industry today would not survive in a competitive tech environment like Silicon Valley.

This is not even considering how the standard industry delay between the time of a song’s stream and the time of recognizing its royalties is quite long — about two quarters. In fact, I may have to wait longer than that in some cases, since organizations like Music Reports Inc. and SoundExchange will only pay out the royalties via check after $50 to $100 have accumulated (fortunately, the threshold lowers to between $10 and $50 if I sign up for direct deposit).

Aside from payment schedules, the two main usability issues I’ve encountered with these sites are 1) lack of actionable data from streaming analytics platforms, and 2) lack of product interoperability for artists registering their music across the many requisite organizations. I’ll use Spotify for Artists to explain the first point, and the collection of U.S. mechanical royalties through Harry Fox Agency and Music Reports Inc. to explain the second.

More actionable streaming analytics

With beautiful colors and a clean interface offering the largest set of metrics I’ve seen so far in the music industry, Spotify for Artists is a pioneer in artist-facing analytics. But it’s precisely because even a pioneer like Spotify still has much more potential for improvement that I’ll draw upon their platform to demonstrate why the music industry’s technological standard should be leagues higher than it currently is, for everyone’s benefit.

Spotify for Artists offers listener, stream and follower counts on a daily basis, with the options to view last 7-day, 28-day and all-time aggregate views of these stats. Other metrics include listeners’ age and gender, sources of streams (from the listener’s own playlist, others’ playlists, the artist’s profile, etc.), top countries and top cities; all of these metrics are viewable only for the last 28 days at maximum.

While these numbers are interesting, and the graphs enjoyable to interact with, they fall short of informing the user about what to do with that data. If anything, the user may be less inclined to use the data at all, because they are unsure how to gain a tangible benefit from these metrics other than satiated curiosity.

Compared to what is available in the wider tech world, music streaming analytics platforms provide neither enough baseline metrics to form actionable conclusions, nor enough ways to analyze various cuts of these metrics together.

Imagine what artists and their teams could do if they had access to something like Google Analytics for music streaming and downloads. Google Analytics allows users to go much deeper into different views of their data, including but not limited to customizable date ranges, comparisons of month-over-month counts (or any date ranges you please) with percent change per data point, which websites listeners come from and which pages they navigate to right after.

Referrals (other websites and URLs where listeners came from) in particular would be powerful to add. With today’s Spotify for Artists, seeing a spike of recent streams coming from my Spotify profile instead of from listeners’ own playlists might indicate that new listeners are discovering my music from elsewhere. While that’s exciting, I have little idea how to actually incorporate this data into an improved outreach strategy outside of Spotify so I can continue supporting this trend. Did this spike in listeners on my profile come from a social media post or a press article? If it came from a group of people who shared my music online, whom can I thank directly?

Furthermore, just making more metrics available won’t help if they’re all tracked in isolation. For example, if an artist discovers a surprising number of listeners in Sweden, they would still need more granular cuts of those data points than just “country” in order to understand their fanbase and run an effective targeted marketing campaign off-platform. What were the age ranges and genders of those listeners in Sweden specifically? Filtering a dataset by one metric, then tracking other metrics for the remaining dataset — similar to building Segments in Google Analytics — will enable users to make informed decisions and action upon the data.

This functionality will become increasingly important as Spotify tries to position itself as an advertising platform that major industry partners like Universal Music Group should take seriously.

Product interoperability for metadata

As an indie artist in the U.S., I own 100% of the rights to my solo work as a publisher, writer and performing artist. This also means it’s up to me to collect:

• Performance royalties from my performance rights organization (PRO),
• Interactive streaming and digital-download royalties from my distributor,
• Non-interactive streaming royalties from SoundExchange, and
• Mechanical royalties from Harry Fox Agency (HFA) and Music Reports Inc. (MRI)

Quite a large cast of characters, yes? Some (like SoundExchange) were formed to carry out legal statutes, while others such as independent distributors (CD Baby, DistroKid, Tunecore, etc.) spun up specifically to join the competitive market. Each organization typically takes a commission fee on royalties (between 5% and 20%) before passing on the rest to the artist.

I could have paid to have yet another company handle all of these royalty collections for me, but I wanted to go through the process with each organization myself to see what it’s really like.

The process is unnecessarily tedious, and music registration is the primary bottleneck. Every time I want to release a new song, I need to log in to each company’s individual site and fill out much of the same information about this song across each platform in a repetitive way, either through their user interface or through a spreadsheet template they provide.

Uploading spreadsheets saves time when registering multiple songs, but even then there are several straightforward improvements that would vastly improve the user experience:

1. Standardization. Many of the spreadsheet templates overlap in terms of the information they collect, but their columns are labeled and ordered differently. HFA and MRI exemplify this issue: They provide the same kind of services to artists. Yet HFA’s spreadsheet template has 19 fields, eight of which are unique; MRI’s template has 16 fields, seven of which are unique. There are nine fields in both templates that request the same information, as described in the table below, but they have different names and appear in different orders on their respective templates.

Just as PROs like ASCAP and BMI use the same third-party format for cue sheet submissions, why can’t HFA and MRI accept similarly standardized input for their music catalog registration? Even if both organizations are for-profit, they are each the exclusive collector of mechanical royalties for a given digital service provider (DSP) such as Apple Music or Amazon Music — so until a merger or acquisition occurs, artists must register with both organizations to receive their U.S. mechanical royalties from all DSPs. Given this current state of affairs, such established industry players can and should strive to make everyone’s lives easier through national and even global standardization.

(There have been efforts to create global standardized formats such as Electronic Batch Registration and Common Works Registration. However, these formats are still far from being “standard,” and I haven’t come across them in my experiences as an artist outside of doing my own separate reading and research on the topic.)

2. Documentation. Much of the tediousness in the registration process also comes from lack of documentation on how the input should look. It’s often unclear what the difference is between seemingly similar spreadsheet column names, like “Administrator” and “Publisher,” which can be an obstacle for individual artists who are not familiar with more esoteric industry terminology.

SoundExchange — a nonprofit unlike HFA and MRI — provides a stellar template with color-coded cells, a tab filled with detailed examples and a glossary of terms, a third reference tab of ISO-2/ISO-3 country codes for a quick lookup and a separate blog post that walks through their user interface and all required fields.

In contrast, HFA’s proprietary eSong template comes with no examples, tutorials or explanations other than the column names themselves. MRI’s template has a somewhat helpful “Examples” tab with sample rows, even if it is missing some situations; for instance, ‘[sample label]’ is populated in the Label column on all sample rows, but it’s not clear whether an unsigned artist should leave the field blank, fill in ‘Independent’, or something else. I’ve since learned seemingly innocuous differences like these (along with order of first name and last name) can result in failure to recognize mechanical royalties if the incoming requests from DSPs to use my registered music don’t match all of their relevant fields precisely.

I’ve personally spent many cycles wondering what HFA’s “Split” column meant, looking through the FAQ, Googling for a tutorial, and then pretending to add a song through HFA’s user interface to see what format the “Split” column on the spreadsheet might correspond to on the website form. I assume this to be the percentage split of mechanical royalties. Should the percentage be a positive integer up to … 100, or instead use decimal points and fractional percentages? Would this only be the percentage owed to my publisher account, or also to other publishers? How should I input different percentages if the owner and admin publishers are different?

In asking these questions, I’m attempting to overcome a fundamental communication gap that isn’t even a technology problem at its core, yet leverages technology in a befuddling way. As for “Split,” I would take my best guess on how to interpret this crucial field, and then hope for the best.

Yet we can all do so much better than that. Artists shouldn’t have to guess on the metadata these organizations need and hope for “the best” — they need and deserve accurate payments, and especially clear guidance to get there if they don’t know where to start.

As discussed above, artists should also have granular and flexible access to their music analytics so they can understand what they can actually do with that data. Efforts to streamline these processes can go a long way for everyone involved, particularly by empowering independent artists to run their careers more effectively.