How music professionals use data to market new releases

By: Julie Knibbe

Published: 2020-08-31

This is the second installment in a five-part series about how music professionals use data across multiple industry sectors, including A&R, artist development, live events and royalty management.

Navigate to the rest of the series:

With 40,000 songs uploaded to Spotify every day, more artists than ever are now vying for fans’ attention online. Marketing and promotional costs comprise the largest expense for record companies: According to the IFPI, labels worldwide invest an estimated $4.5 billion, or around 27% of recorded-music revenues, back into artists & repertoire (A&R) and marketing.

In this landscape, efficient marketing campaigns are key to breaking emerging acts in a sustainable way over time. Music-industry professionals use data as a tool to reduce risk and optimize these marketing investments.

Today, artists and their teams can access key analytics about music consumption and listener behavior from nearly every actor of the music value chain, including but not limited to audio and video streaming services, social media platforms, radio stations and T.V. and film syncs. Marketers develop their insights by reconciling all of these data sources —  a process that can be time-consuming and overwhelming if one doesn’t have a particular goal in mind.

From planning and execution to reporting, I’ll break down below how data can guide and inform decisions across every step of a song release marketing campaign.

1. Planning: Using data to evaluate potential and set goals

A. Define a target audience and set goals

When industry professionals plan a song release, the first step they will usually take is setting key goals and a budget.

From the artist’s perspective, definitions of success vary widely from one case to another, and are rarely defined in financial terms. Artists themselves are more likely to define their goals either in terms of promotional support (“I would like to be featured on [insert media outlet here]”), or in terms of concrete or abstract career milestones ( “I would like to reach a million views” or “I would like to have a career like [artist name]”).

While the integrity of an artist’s own story and creative vision are crucial, marketers need more well-defined, contextual benchmarks to figure out the best steps for bringing that vision to life.

In the previous article, we discussed how nailing down a target audience is one of the three key elements of crafting a good data-driven story around an artist. The same principle applies to marketing, and marketers need to study the behaviors of artists’ audiences to determine how they will ultimately go to market with a given song. A non-exhaustive list of key questions:

Social media analytics tools are particularly helpful when it comes to evaluating the target audience in this way.

Let’s take the example of indie artist Anissa Altmayer, a French singer-songwriter planning the release of her first solo album this fall. She sings poetic French chanson with modern pop accents, accompanied by her own cello playing.

The first tools to reference are her own artist analytics, to understand who engages the most with her. Her Instagram and Facebook analytics, included below, show that her core audience skews towards men, living in Paris, aged between 25 and 34 years old.

Altmayer’s marketing plan will most likely focus on the French market, and on the Parisian region in particular. The first goal will be to develop her core audience among French chanson fans in Paris. Since she’s still at the very beginning of her career, we need to evaluate how many French chanson listeners she could potentially appeal to (in other industries, this is sometimes called the “total addressable market”). In order to do that, we can use audience comparison tools to compare her reach to that of similar French chanson artists, such as Brigitte and Pomme. Looking at other artists’ reach indicates how many fans could also like the music Altmayer produces.

Pomme and Brigitte’s social media analytics show similar patterns, with their core fans located in Paris, aged 25–34. We now have a preliminary goal of developing Altmayer’s career and audience to arrive at a similar stage as Brigitte.

(A side note about artist comparisons: Altmayer is not directly “competing” against these other two artists. One could argue that they do compete for French chanson fans’ attention. However, songs typically have short, repeatable formats; listening to a song is not as attention-intensive as watching a show or reading a book, and loving a new song doesn’t prevent you from listening to other ones as well. Music artists also have a tradition of supporting other acts they like, which makes the notion of competition in the music industry a bit different from other media industries.)

Before a given release date, managers and marketers also look at the figures around previous release campaigns, as benchmarks to define what the next step should be for their artists. Examples of such figures include:

Marketers would then compare these figures to those of other artists in similar territories, genres and career stages, especially if they don’t have any point of reference with previous releases. Based on these estimates around target streams and promotional goals, they can evaluate how much they will invest and what plan of action they will take to promote the single or album.

In the above screenshot (anonymized but built with real-life data), Song A was released first and set an example of how many times the song was listened to in the first 3 weeks. We can see a launch boost on the first Friday, and then a slow decrease within the next few weeks, with listening drops on the weekends. The team could anticipate that Song B would follow the same pattern — and that’s almost exactly what happened.

B. Develop the marketing plan

Once marketers define a target audience in terms of territory, demographics and musical genre, they then define which exact levers they are going to pull for promotion.

For emerging artists, the key is to develop a core, engaged audience of superfans that will expand organically. To accomplish this goal, marketers find it effective to work with influencers — e.g. playlist curators, radio DJs, blogs, YouTube channels, TikTok personalities and other online or offline media channels — to get the word out about their artists. (Paid advertising is best leveraged in a second phase to boost a spark that should be already there, in order to avoid wasting investments on an audience that is not already engaged.)

Data can help in defining specifically which influencers they could aim to work with. As mentioned above, marketers can look into who already supported the artist during previous releases, and how effective those promotions were in terms of increasing the artist’s reach and followers on streaming and social platforms. Or, they can look at which influencers have promoted similar artists in the past, and go from there. These tactics may sound obvious, but marketers have so many tasks to handle during a release that it’s easy to forget a valuable partner on the way.

Back to Anissa Altmayer’s example, one way to find influencers to work with to promote her first album is to use tools like Soundcharts or Chartmetric as filters. These tools provide public data about more than two million artists, and are especially useful for benchmarking purposes. Looking at similar French chanson artist Brigitte’s playlist entries on Spotify, we can identify that Altmayer could aim, like Brigitte, to get into the “Variété d’Aujourd’hui” or the “Exception Française” playlists, which each reach between 40,000 and 80,000 followers. The same approach can apply to determining which radio stations and media outlets would be open to featuring a French Chanson artist. For more established artists, Chartmetric has a playlist recommendation feature that does this work of comparing similar artists’ playlist entries.

Apart from playlists, radios and blogs, it’s worth a reminder that artists are influencers among themselves as well, and will often promote or follow similar artists on their own channels. For instance, Brigitte’s most-followed followers on Instagram include other French chanson singers such as Carla Bruni and Louane.

2. Execution: Using data in real-time to adapt and optimize campaigns

Managers and marketers use data to monitor the results of their promotional efforts, in order to concentrate those efforts on channels that have the most impact.

During the rollout phase of a campaign, marketers draw upon data analytics tools to check that everything is going according to plan — that programmers are indeed playing the song, the song is being placed in the proper playlists and so on. Typically, they monitor streams and listeners per song and per territory on a daily basis, then report on it to their team on a weekly basis (more on reporting in the next section below). On a more granular level, many marketers also subscribe to real-time alerts of chart movements or playlist placements from services like Spot On Track or Soundcharts, so that they can react quickly to specific updates in a campaign and leverage them as social proof to catch people’s attention.

For every platform on which marketers promote their artists, they check for “healthy” engagement ratios, asking questions like:

These sources help point to whether an artist’s growth and fan engagement are organic and sustainable. In a streaming-specific context, moving from “passive” streams originating from algorithmic or editorial playlist promotion to “active” streams from search engines and user libraries is among marketers’ main goals of creating a sustainable fan base for an artist.

[Pictured above: Sources of all streams on Deezer, 2018]

There’s no one-size-fits-all benchmark for a healthy engagement ratio, as the definition of “healthy” depends on the artist’s music genre or career stage. The bigger the audience, the lower the average engagement rates tend to be. For example, Beyoncé has an Instagram engagement rate of 1.65%, which is low but normal given how broad her audience is; emerging act Claire Rosinkranz has a rate of 23.89% thanks to a smaller and more focused audience. That said, good benchmarks for a given artist can be gleaned from studying the trajectories of similar artists.

Case study: Marshmello and Fortnite

In February 2019, Marshmello held the first-ever music performance in the popular video game Fortnite. The historic event sparked much curiosity among fans and the media, and was successful in developing awareness of virtual music experiences and putting Marshmello at the forefront of digital innovation in music and entertainment.

Several media outlets covered how the concert helped boost Marshmello’s overall viewership on YouTube:

“The songs that Marshmello performed during his Fortnite concert skyrocketed thousands of percent in streams (…). His song ‘Check This Out’ saw the biggest boost, with on-demand video streams leaping almost 24,000% on Feb. 2 compared to the previous day.” (Source: Forbes)

However, we can see in the above chart that the boost in Marshmello’s YouTube streams didn’t translate much into more followers on other streaming platforms. The curiosity and spike in activity was directed more at the virtual experience than at the artist himself.

A successful promotional campaign for an artist should also manifest in growth that is spread more evenly across different networks. A fan who loves an artist’s music would not only listen to them on YouTube, Spotify, Amazon or Apple Music, but would also follow and engage with them on Instagram, Facebook and increasingly TikTok.

A note on A/B tests

Marketers can also use data to run A/B tests to adapt advertising campaigns to fan behaviors in real time, and to invest in the kind of content that is producing the healthiest engagement rates.

Although A/B testing is a common practice in advertising for many other industries, it’s not very common in the music industry. Applying these more rational techniques to creative content proves to be tricky, as songs or video clips can be expensive to produce, in terms of both finances and emotional energy.

That said, marketers can use A/B tests to try different wordings or calls-to-action in ad messages to see what resonates best with their target audience. In general, music-industry professionals, especially indie labels and marketers, are developing a more agile, “test-and-learn” approach to learning from past marketing campaigns, documenting what worked and what didn’t on a more regular basis, in order to focus their investments more efficiently.

3. Reporting: Using data to report on campaign performance and uncover more insights

Reporting serves two purposes in marketing campaigns. First, reporting helps keep teams motivated and reassured that everything is going according to plan — an important consideration for artists and multitasking team members who may feel stressed over overwhelmed in the process of rolling out a new song.

Second, building a report helps document and analyze what worked best in a given campaign, what could be improved and what new opportunities could be explored in the future. For example, running a post-release analysis of the song performance in several markets, and creating a benchmark against global growth metrics, can help identify the best performing regions and maximize long-term impact.

These habits of digging in data to develop, execute and analyze a marketing plan are slowly being adopted industry-wide with success, but are not yet standard because of the time and resources required. As Soundcharts founder/CEO David Weiszfeld tells me:

Setting the right goals and KPIs, defining strategies to reach these goals, and then monitoring campaigns as they progress have been challenging tasks for every music company. This is mainly due to the historically low adoption rate of market intelligence platforms compared to other (digital) industries and it prevents them from evaluating plans and campaigns objectively. Worst, it has also prevented most companies from understanding the local and global music landscapes beyond the usual “did we get New Music Friday in country x or y.”

But going back to the beginning of this article, music marketing is expensive, and the ecosystem is more crowded than ever. In this environment, artists and their teams can’t afford not to know more about how their songs and brands are really resonating with their audiences.

These kinds of investments are crucial not just for standard music releases, but also for long-term artist development. Even when artists don’t have new music coming out, their teams can use analytics and market intelligence platforms to develop a better understanding of their fan bases, analyze which channels are the most promising for outreach and even reinvest in songs that may not have reached their full potential with new territories or listeners. It’s difficult — perhaps impossible — to play the long game blind.