How music professionals use data to pitch artists

By: Julie Knibbe

Published: 2021-01-11

This is the first 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. Part one below focuses on the role of data in crafting a good narrative and business pitch around an artist, with principles applicable to all career stages.

Here are links to the rest of the series:

Hi! I’m Julie, and I’ve been working with music data for about seven years — first at Deezer working on discovery algorithms, and then at Soundcharts creating data analytics tools to help music professionals discover artists and develop artists’ careers. While building the product department at Soundcharts from scratch, I had the opportunity to interview dozens of music professionals about their working process to help them best leverage our datasets. Now, through my own company Music Tomorrow, I provide data analytics and product management services to artists and labels to help them develop innovative digital strategies.

While more of the music industry is opening up to the importance of a data-driven mindset, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of available information. Professionals should explore data with a purpose, and I’ve made it my personal mission to make data and technology more understandable and accessible to music professionals so they can make the best of it.

The importance of storytelling when pitching an artist

Everyone remembers a good story. The power of a good story to move us and change our attitudes and behaviors has neurological underpinnings, and highly strategic implications for all kinds of businesses. Especially in the music industry, where even the mere perception of growth and momentum has its own multiplier effects, storytelling is often cited as the number one skill to improve and master in one’s career.

The lower the barrier to entry in the music industry gets, the more important storytelling becomes in rising above the subsequent noise. Millions of creators today are struggling to get noticed by professionals in A&R, booking and content curation who are perpetually flooded with inbound requests for attention and feedback. From pitching for placement in editorial playlists and press outlets to negotiating contract terms, music professionals are always refining the way they present the artists they work with to make their story stick with their business partners and with the public.

In 2020, what kinds of artistic stories really resonate — and what role does data really play?

As many people have argued in the past, talent alone is no longer enough (or even a prerequisite at all) to succeed in music. To reduce their risk as well as keep up with technology, industry stakeholders increasingly rely on data analytics as a filter for evaluating opportunities and potential artist signings. In the words of Adel Hattem, founder of D Music Marketing: “People don’t want to hear ‘Oh ye, that’s a great act’ anymore — they want to see the numbers.”

But good numbers alone are not enough, either. Cognitive psychology research has shown that a fact becomes 22 times more memorable when it is wrapped in a story. In order to build a compelling case around an artist, you can’t just have good music and promising business figures — you need a story to tie it all together.

How to tell a good data story

Marketers define storytelling as the process of combining factual evidence with a deeper, emotional narrative to communicate a core message or vision to a specific audience.

There are three core elements to a good data story, as illustrated below:

First things first, a good data story starts with a core message. In the context of pitching, the fundamental goal of storytelling is to be remembered, so your core narrative should focus not only on what makes your artist unique, but also why fans will be compelled to listen.

Once you have this first part down, you strengthen your data story by backing up your core narrative with factual information. The more your facts are quantifiable and verifiable, the more your story will resonate with an industry audience.

As people in the industry gradually become more data-literate, it’s also important not just to pluck numbers out of thin air; the more context you provide around the numbers, the more credible your story will be. If you are only able to work with facts that are shorter-term, smaller-scale or more circumstantial — e.g. a song by an emerging artist suddenly goes viral thanks to a TikTok dance challenge — make sure to envision the artist’s career moving forward, and to lean into the kinds of factors and support systems that will influence the long-term, positive progress of your data in your pitch.

Also, be careful to pick data points for your story that show how you stand out compared to other artists in the same genre and territory. Sometimes, your audience won’t have points of comparison in mind within your particular genre, or don’t know whether the numbers you are stating are actually meaningful. If you bring up examples of how your artist compares favorably to peers in a similar category, it will make your audience’s job easier. Again, context drives credibility.

The third key element is the audience: Both the narrative you craft and the facts you choose to highlight should be tailored to the people you are pitching to. For example,  label A&Rs and project managers who are evaluating the potential to sign and develop their artists long-term tend to focus more on the higher-level narrative, as they themselves will lean on this kind of narrative later on to cultivate the artist’s audience. In contrast, the live industry’s outlook tends to be more focused on the present than on the future by nature of its business model, which relies on convincing existing audiences to buy tickets to shorter-term gigs. Hence they tend to focus more on local, city-level fan engagement numbers to evaluate artists.

In a nutshell:

Case study: Contextualizing curator and influencer support

One of the first career milestones an artist can have is getting support from influencers and curators, whether through a first radio spin, an Instagram story mention or a high-profile editorial playlist or blog feature.

The rapid rise of Toni Watson (a.k.a. Tones and I) last year was a good example of this kind of storytelling in practice. The singer and songwriter’s beginnings were relatable for many artists, as she nurtured her music career from the ground up by busking in the streets and living in her van in Byron Bay, Australia. She stood out with her unique voice and her catchy, looped beats and synthesizers, and was noticed early on by the entertainment lawyer Jackson Walkden-Brown, who soon became her manager. Walkden-Brown advised that she continue to refine her busking style and build her fan base organically.

When Watson was ready, they posted her first single “Johnny Run Away” on triple j Unearthed, where she got noticed by music directors and was added to full rotation on local terrestrial radio, helping to jumpstart her career. The human-driven story of busking and hustling to build a fan base from the ground up became a core part of her narrative, which was backed up by five-star reviews on Unearthed and consumption figures demonstrating strong organic growth.

To date, her biggest hit single “Dance Monkey,” released with the help of Elektra Records for international distribution, spent a record-breaking 24 weeks at No. 1 on Australia’s ARIA Singles Chart. To put this number into more context, the previous Australian woman to hold such a record in the ARIA singles charts was Kylie Minogue at seven weeks. Watson also broke many international chart records; for instance, “Dance Monkey” stayed at No. 1 on Spotify’s Global Top 200 chart for 120 days, the same amount of time as Post Malone’s “Rockstar,” and has stayed in this chart for over 350 days (i.e. almost a full year) in total.

For any artist, getting that first wave of engagement on a platform like Unearthed can help spark early interest and attention from influencers and curators. Playlist curators in particular are considered to be powerful influencers on artists’ careers today; at the highest level, placement on a major playlist like Today’s Top Hits on Spotify is worth nearly 20 million additional streams and six figures in incremental revenue growth, according to a study from the European Commission. And just as perceived momentum has its own multiplier effects, curation often begets more curation, as curators often look to each other for signals on which artists are worth amplifying in the moment.

However, a mention or a playlist feature is not an effective data point in itself. To best leverage such opportunities, adding more context through impact measures can help take an artist’s story to the next level. If a YouTube or Instagram influencer mentioned an artist on their channels, how did their audience respond? What was the click-through rate for their posts?

Editorial playlist support is also a double-edged sword, as playlists don’t always get high engagement relative to their number of followers. This can lead to weaker long-term impact on artists’ audience growth and can cause artists to over-inflate their performance in their pitches to potential partners, which sets themselves up for failure to deliver on the promises. When mentioning an editorial playlist placement, make sure you can point to how the placement actually translates into organic listenership and song adds to users’ personal playlists, especially if your results are better than average.

Case study: The nuances of online fan engagement

You cannot have a conversation about data storytelling in 2020 without addressing click farms and fake views. Unfortunately, services still abound that allow artists and influencers to buy views and followers to game various algorithms and charts across streaming and social apps. But it’s increasingly difficult to use these tactics to trick professionals in the industry, as they have tools like Socialblade, Chartmetric and Soundcharts to scrutinize and fact-check everything they are told, whether or not the artists in question are on their roster.

When it comes to convincing someone to work with your artist, nothing beats genuine fan engagement. Today, music professionals across the board focus more on growth and engagement than on raw numbers of views or followers when evaluating artists. The primary KPIs are often in the form of ratios, such as the ratio of Instagram comments to followers, of YouTube channel subscribers to views or of Spotify followers to monthly listeners. In all these instances, the general consensus is that the higher the ratio, the better the engagement.

Professionals will also be looking at whether an artist’s growth and engagement are organic and sustained, as well as how they compare to those of similar artists. In practice, they will check if growth builds incrementally over time and is consistently spread out across networks. An artist with a genuine audience is usually growing evenly across social networks and streaming platforms. On the contrary, inorganic growth looks like sudden spikes in YouTube views or Instagram followers, but no corresponding increase in Spotify listeners.

K-pop is ripe with case studies for the power of a good fan-engagement story. Blackpink and BTS in particular are famous for their meteoric streaming and social-media numbers, and their fans (a.k.a. ARMYs) take pride in helping the groups achieve their outstanding results. However, surface-level vanity metrics like monthly listeners, YouTube views or followers alone don’t tell much of a story about actual fan engagement. Of course, it’s nice to reach over 80 million views in 24 hours for a single video, as Blackpink recently achieved on YouTube. But these numbers by themselves don’t guarantee or communicate sustainable success — especially given that the larger an artist’s follower base grows, the harder it becomes to achieve good engagement rates.

As of July 7th, 2020, Blackpink has an Instagram engagement rate of 10.8% for a follower base of 25.5 million. (This was calculated by dividing the average engagement per post, including comments and likes, by the total number of followers, over a two-month period.) To put things into perspective, a typical ratio for an artist at this career level looks more like 3%; for example, Lady Gaga is at 2.45%, and The Weeknd is at 3.4%. No Western artist with a comparably large follower base has achieved Blackpink’s record so far, showing that the group’s fan engagement is at another level beyond just surface-level views. Given that 78% of Blackpink’s Instagram follower base is female, these numbers also tie into the group’s core narrative of girl power, which resonates internationally.

Another engagement metric that is also worth looking at is streaming retention. If an artist has editorial playlisting support on a service like Spotify, monthly listenership will naturally be up thanks to increased exposure. However, to see if fans actually like and connect with the music and the artist, professionals will look at how this exposure translates into new followers, repeat streams and song adds to users’ personal playlists. Depending on the extent of editorial playlisting support, a good retention ratio of followers to monthly listeners would range from 20% to 40%.

Case study: Do charts still matter?

In the mainstream music world, getting into a top chart is still a career milestone and factual evidence of a success story. Major labels command a majority share over the charts that people pay the most attention to, namely in trade publications like Billboard and Rolling Stone. One often reads about Weeks on Charts in these publications as a strong barometer of success (e.g. Post Malone recently made headlines about breaking records for most weeks spent in the top-10 ranks of the Billboard Hot 100 chart).

But one under-discussed element of charts and rankings is that they actually matter for emerging artists as well. Rankings can help uncover a viral hit and back up a story, as they offer an easy and clear point of comparison with other artists or songs.

Now that almost everything is tracked and measured about fan behavior and music consumption, the number of rankings available to professionals has expanded widely. Apart from charts on streaming platforms, several social, ecommerce and live-music platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Shazam, Genius, Bandcamp and Bandsintown also provide their own rankings of music artists within their own platforms.

Appearing in charts is becoming more and more accessible, as more and more rankings now exist for many forms of engagement across many different kinds of platforms. This does not mean that charts matter less — on the contrary, professionals are keeping a closer eye than ever on these rankings at international, local and genre levels to uncover emerging talent and stay ahead of the market.

Megan Thee Stallion offers a good case study of the power of charts to serve as signals of organic growth. The rapper bootstrapped her career from the ground up, thanks to her videos going viral and noticed on social media. She has been posting her freestyles and battles on her Instagram account since college, and coined the catchphrase “hot girl summer” in April 2018, which helped increase her organic social following. Her core, multilayered narrative — in which she centers the importance of enabling women to be outspoken and sexually explicit on their own terms, all while pursuing a healthcare management degree — matches her open attitude on social networks.

Megan first hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart in January 2019 with “Big Ole Freak”; it took 16 more months for her to get her first No. 1 Hot 100 hit in May 2020, with “Savage Remix” (ft. Beyoncé). But within that time period, Megan also had over two dozen entries on the Trending charts for Instagram and TikTok on Soundcharts. Like Tones and I, Megan achieved the career milestone of getting into a top chart relatively quickly, but it was the coupling of this velocity with evidence of organic growth that really backed up how much her message resonates with her audience.

In general, velocity doesn’t play a major role in communicating a data story around an artist unless the artist reaches certain milestones much faster than usual. For instance, the music video for Arctic Monkeys’ “Do I Wanna Know?” just surpassed one billion views on YouTube, seven years after its initial release. While that achievement got some press coverage, “Dance Monkey” took less than one year to reach the same milestone.

In the case of Arctic Monkeys, the one-billion views milestone is perhaps not as relevant or important to their career story, as they have already proven themselves to achieve commercial success and engage organically with fans for several years. And if you manage to dominate the charts in record time, it won’t mean anything unless you have the context of an organically engaged fan base and an emotionally resonant narrative to back it up.