How artist-friendly are music streaming platforms? Part 3: Data analytics

This is Part 3 of our five-part series comparing For Artists features on streaming platforms. Catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 , or browse our product feature matrix for the full breakdown.

---

In part 2 of our “For Artists” series comparing features on streaming platforms, we demonstrated how independent artists can use these tools to brand themselves better, and customize the listening experience for those visiting their artist profiles. Our full product feature matrix demonstrates which music streaming services offer the most options for artists to make their profiles richer, through the ability to add detailed artist bios, imagery, featured music, artist-curated playlists, and more.

While there is incentive for artists to utilize FA platforms to unify their brand and listener experience across multiple DSPs, the main priority for artists accessing these platforms is to receive detailed consumption data and listener demographics from that particular DSP.

Today, the level of detail for music consumption and listener demographics data is the highest at the source of listening — the DSPs themselves . A third-party music distribution platform can show an independent artist the number of streams and downloads of a song across each individual DSP in a consolidated dashboard, but that’s about it. More granular data in areas like audience segmentation and editorial playlist inclusion will need to come directly from the DSPs.

Spotify is the clear leader in offering rich artist data, as we will dive into in the next section. In fact, with a 30% market share of global music subscriptions, it should be expected that Spotify deliver artists a larger set of consumption data versus other DSPs.

While Apple Music FA is rather limited in its features to allow artists to customize their artist profiles, the DSP offers a breadth of artist data — most notably Shazam data, which can help artists understand how likable their music is, considering one has to express interest in a track in order to desire to Shazam it. YouTube Studio also offers a wide range of artist data for artists using YouTube Official Artist Channels (read part 2 to better understand what an OAC is), and uniquely can track the use of artists’ music in user-generated videos on the wider YouTube platform.

Lower on the totem pole, Amazon Music FA and Deezer for Creators (FA) offer the most basic consumption and demographic data sets. TIDAL FA, which offers a great set of artist profile customization features, recently added a “Fans” data set which includes very limited consumption data (no stream counts, only a list of top listened to tracks) and demographics.

As for how much DSPs are leaning on artist data analytics as PR fodder, it’s a surprisingly mixed bag — and sometimes the PR is more negative than positive. Neither Apple Music FA nor YouTube Studio have made much news in the past few years about offering new artist data sets, or even trumpeting the vast sets data they already offer. In July 2023, Spotify made industry headlines for removing artists’ historical streaming and demographic data between 2015 and 2020, if artists had released music in that time frame. Now Spotify is only offering artist data within the past two years from the most current date. Spotify may believe that their new FA offering called “ audience segments ” — announced less than a month after they removed historical data — could make up for the data loss.

• Spotify for Artists: 8.5
• Apple Music for Artists: 8
• YouTube Studio: 7.5
• SoundCloud for Artists: 6
• Amazon Music for Artists: 5.5
• Deezer for Creators: 5
• Pandora AMP: 5
• TIDAL for Artists: 3

View full, detailed feature breakdowns in our “For Artists” product matrix.

---

Spotify FA offers a wide range of consumption and demographic data about the songs in an artist’s catalog. A unique ability of Spotify FA is to notify an artist when their songs have been added to a playlist made by a Spotify user (in some cases, these subscribers are also important playlist curators) and also track how many streams are driven by such playlists. The platform also tracks the streaming consumption of songs within official playlists made by Spotify’s editorial team or algorithms. With these metrics, artists can potentially determine how much of their listenership comes from fans directly accessing their music, or if new listeners are discovering their music through Spotify playlists.

Another strength of Spotify FA is that it will allow remix producers and co-primary artists on individual tracks to receive streaming stats for those tracks, versus confining that data to one individual artist, as is the case with most FA platforms.

While Spotify continues to innovate with new data offerings, some artists may find new metrics — e.g. “Total Audience,” which compares the amount of listeners an artist had in the past 28 days against how many unique listeners an artist had over the past 2 years — a bit confusing. There’s a steep learning curve on how to make use of some of the more niche metrics Spotify has been rolling out in the past two years. Moreover, since some of these feature sets are in beta, they often launch and then are discontinued soon after.

What Apple Music for Artists lacks in profile customization and audience engagement features, it makes up for with excellent data visualizations and compact dashboards.

The Apple for Artists home page provides an overview of streams, average daily listeners, song purchases, and Shazams of the artist’s catalog — as granular as one-week numbers, and as extensive as a career-spanning summation. Below this overview, Apple gives recent milestones (for example, X song hit 1,000 streams this week) and a heat map displaying top cities during the selected timeframe. The Apple Music FA dashboard and visualizations are more consolidated than on Spotify, which tabs their data into multiple sections.

Apple bought music identification service Shazam for $400 million in 2018, and subsequently added the data from the service to Apple Music FA. Artists using Apple Music FA can utilize the Shazam data to understand how many people are Shazaming their individual songs and from what geographies, including filters for city, country, and region. Such data allows artists to identify potential radio or DJ airplay of their songs, and how likable their songs were when played. For example, a high number of Shazams in a single city could indicate a song was played on the radio or at a local music festival.

Apple Music FA is only rated slightly less than Spotify FA because it seems to lack detail on artists’ music included in user playlists. Furthermore, Apple Music has not offered any new data sets to artists in several years even as their consumer-facing product has evolved, while Spotify continues to innovate and offer new data.

YouTube Studio is the analytics suite for artists with “Official Artist Channels” on YouTube. Its dashboard allows artists to benchmark a song’s performance against their other video content. More importantly, YouTube Studio tracks the music’s use in third-party uploads, including consumption data from those third-party posts. Artists will find this useful if they want to track if their music is being used in user-generated content on YouTube and what kind of views those posts are getting.

YouTube Studio also allows artists to track the average time someone spends “viewing a song” — though if a user is simply listening to the audio of a song on the platform, that stat is the same as the average time spent listening to a song, a crucial stat for artists. It is a great indicator of how individual songs perform in the artist’s overall catalog.

Compared to Spotify and Apple Music For Artists, YouTube Studio’s analytics suite is as robust. The platform’s only glaring omission is in data visualization, as it could benefit from a map of geographic audience data. Still, compared to Apple and Spotify, which only allow for two total CSV data exports from their dashboards, almost every data set on YouTube Studio is exportable as a CSV file, which a data analyst could use to build audience maps using other tools.

SoundCloud Insights is the artist data dashboard within the larger Soundcloud FA platform. As would be expected with any FA data offering, Insights shows streaming consumption of individual tracks for a variety of time ranges, including custom periods and all-time (with an asterisk — although SoundCloud has been around since 2008, the data only goes as far back as 2016).

Insights can show artists some unique data points because of SoundCloud’s distinct features for listeners. For example, listeners using SoundCloud can repost an artist’s track to their activity feed, or download a track if the artist has enabled downloads. These two data points — track reposts and downloads — are served up on the Insights dashboard. SoundCloud even measures an artist’s top listeners and reveals their usernames within the Insights platform, allowing artists the opportunity to get in touch with their top fans through direct messaging.

While SoundCloud is not utilized as a major music streaming service anywhere near the extent of Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and YouTube,  these fan-centric features can be valuable for artists who have developed a loyal, niche following among SoundCloud listeners.

Amazon Music FA, like SoundCloud Insights, offers the basic streaming consumption data of an artist’s individual tracks for a variety of time ranges including custom periods and all time back to 2018. This FA platform identifies a specific number of Amazon Music subscribers, and segments them into “fans” and “superfans” of an artist. On an FAQ page , Amazon Music FA says the “fans” segment typically drives 50% of an artist’s streams, and “superfans” 30%.

However, Amazon FA does not specifically reveal how many streams each fan type drove in over any period, so the audience segmentation seems a bit meaningless.

One unique and somewhat cool data set Amazon Music FA has for artists is the number of Alexa voice requests made for an artist or their specific songs. If an artist were to create a marketing campaign where they asked fans to request them using Alexa, this data set would directly show the results. But for having a sizable 13% of music subscription market share, Amazon Music FA has a long way to go to properly share with artists what and how subscribers are listening to their music.

Deezer offers only artist data from the current date back to a year earlier. The kinds of data on display are just the basics: Number of streams per track, number of unique listeners per track, playlist inclusion if it happens for an artist’s track, and a small bit of demographic data with regards to listenership geography. Given Deezer’s focus on European music service subscribers, many US artists may find there is limited data available in their Deezer for Creators dashboard. There are a few datasets currently in beta such as an audience segmentation set titled “Fan Life,” which Deezer says artists may have to pay for the privilege to access in the future. Overall, there’s a lot of room to grow here.

Pandora AMP, their FA platform, matches Deezer’s artist data offering. Pandora’s initial analytics service, Next Big Sound, is now shuttered. One distinct area Pandora can offer artists in terms of data is how many Pandora users started unique non-interactive radio stations based on an artist name or their individual songs.

Despite being the DSP that offers listeners the most detailed artist credits, and a great set of tools to allow an artist to customize their profiles, today TIDAL FA scores a 3 on analytics. That said, there could be plans in the future for TIDAL to offer more streaming data.

TIDAL FA launched the “Fans” tab in their FA platform in late September 2023 and it currently only reveals an artist’s top streamed tracks, but with no specific stream counts attached to those top tracks. The demographic data reveals % of listeners to an artist who fall into specific age categories and what % of listeners are from specific countries.  Artists shouldn’t stress out about the limited data set, as TIDAL has less than 1% of music subscriber market share.

---

It is clear that Spotify FA and Apple Music FA are the two giants in artist data today, but there is a lot to review in each platform.

Artists should be looking for data that shows a listener’s explicit interest in their music — for instance, tracks that are racking up likes, are saved to listeners’ libraries, and added to user-made, algorithmic, or even better yet official editorial playlists.

If the demographic data is extensive enough, as it is in Spotify FA and Apple FA, artists should make note of any geographies, including specific cities and countries, where their music is performing well — though some cities are so absolutely large with a high volume of music service subscribers that they will automatically reflect higher streaming and listenership rates for any artist (e.g. Mexico City ).

Meanwhile, each FA platform seems to offer a unique data point that the others do not. For instance YouTube Studio shows audience attention over a song’s time period (e.g. skip rate), and SoundCloud Insights actually lists the usernames of an artist’s top fans. Here’s a brief chart of some of those unique features, and there are more in our full product matrix .

The data aggregation phenomenon: Third-party platforms

Collecting data across eight FA platforms can be daunting for independent artists. Third-party platforms like Chartmetric , Songstats , and Soundcharts attempt to ease the data overload by providing aggregated DSP data dashboards for artists to understand their audiences better. Such platforms can offer an excellent overview of consumption data at a glance, and even offer some data that DSPs can’t provide. For instance, Songstats integrates analytics from music retailers like Beatport and Traxsource, while SoundCharts includes data on online radio airplay. Chartmetric goes even further, tracking airplay on the US satellite radio network SiriusXM. Subscription costs vary, and each platform has its strengths regarding data coverage — e.g. Chartmetric excels in the US market, while SoundCharts boasts extensive European radio airplay data.

However, there are general drawbacks to using third-party vs. first-party data sources. Unsurprisingly, only partial data sets are available through third-party services, necessitating artists to consult DSPs’ FA platforms directly for the most comprehensive analytics. In practice, artists and music professionals usually opt for a combination of third-party analytics, which offer a wider breadth of market intelligence, and first-party DSP analytics, which give deeper insight into fan and consumption data.

The quest for more data: Advocating for equitable data access

Some industry professionals argue that DSPs should offer artists as much data as possible. Music marketer Steve Mann believes equitable data access is the only fair compensation for small artists, noting : “… everyone should be demanding equitable data access as compensation from the streaming services. There is no streaming rate solution. The only just compensation is data so small artists can be empowered to develop their businesses.”

He contends DSPs withhold useful data sets like skip rates and listener engagement metrics that affect an artist’s platform visibility. For instance, only YouTube shows how long a listener spends on a particular song. Similarly abstruse, Spotify uses a “popularity score” — which measures a song’s likes, streams, saves, playlist adds, and skip rate — to build algorithmic playlists, like Discovery Weekly or Release Radar. . An artist who wants to see their songs’ popularity score could use the website MusicStax.com , but the metric is unavailable within Spotify for Artists itself. Computer programmers using Spotify for Developers can use the DSP’s developer API to extract popularity scores and more data points about a song than artists can access from their own Spotify For Artists accounts.

Further, data access is unequal across the industry. Major labels and strong independents with direct distribution deals receive a wave of data from DSPs, and bring it to a music-focused business analytics solution like Entertainment Intelligence or Revelator . For context, Entertainment Intelligence reports collecting 1.3 billion rows of data daily from the DSPs, with an average of about 150M for each client. Spotify also gave record labels a suite of analytics previously called “Spotify Analytics,” recently relaunched as “Spotify for Labels.” This disparity underscores the importance of understanding the data available on each FA platform.

For labels and artists without access to business analytics platforms, a data scientist could run custom scripts using MySQL or Python or utilize Tableau to find trends in the data — if one has the budget to hire them, that is. Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube allow artists to download CSVs to pull the data into a BI tool. In contrast, Deezer, SoundCloud, TIDAL, and Pandora do not allow artists to download their data as a CSV. All to say, labels and distributors can expect more access with better DSP relationships — leaving the playing field uneven regarding access to artist data, especially for those who are newer to the industry.