In 2020 we wrote about a startup called Release Party that was hosting livestreams for musicians and helping them to sell tickets. The post Release Party rebrands as Offstage with AI-driven analytics appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

This report aims to provide cut-through on the big issues that we think will dominate 2023. In it, we’ve isolated the innovative ideas from some of the most influential thinkers across the music industry – and then drawn out the key learnings for you to take forward as the year unfolds.  In this report, four key perspectives on the coming […]

One of the announcements made at the NY:LON Connect conference this week came from music analytics firm Viberate. The post Viberate slashes the cost of its music analytics service appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Using smart-links to direct fans to their preferred streaming service is a long-established part of music marketing. The post Feature.fm gets YouTube conversion and attribution data appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Profoundly unsurprising news of the day: Taylor Swift has been hugely popular on social media for a long, long time. The post Viberate breaks down ‘Taylor Swift As a Marketing Mastermind’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

While NFTs stole the headlines in 2022, a raft of other exciting developments took place, and various music/tech startups took leaps and bounds as they strove to create new technological opportunities for creativity, commerce, or collaboration in the music space. In this report, we take stock and figure out what it means – and what happens […]

Apple has added more features, including a profile section where musicians can create a customised bio by answering a series of short questions. The post Apple Music for Artists gets new profile and lyrics features appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Mandolin’s next move? Fan analytics and a richer-media take on smart links. It is launching two new services for artists. The post Mandolin expands beyond livestreaming into fan analytics appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

There’s a new music analytics platform in town. ChartCipher is the result of a partnership between MyPart and Hit Songs Deconstructed. The post MyPart and Hit Songs Deconstructed launch analytics service appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

We are now more than 13 years into the music streaming era, but its workings continue to evolve. The post Music, socials and burnout: ‘We’re asking artists to do a lot’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Sparkline is a new platform developed by technology consultancy company Decimal, who mainly work with music clients on development projects. Decimal pitches Sparkline as the “missing analytics tool for Spotify” – a bold claim hinging on its ability to allow users to get insight into third parties on the streaming platform.  The company identified that […]

At last week’s indies session at the UK’s parliamentary inquiry into music streaming, Aim boss Paul Pacifico suggested that major labels buying independent distributors wasn’t necessarily a concern as long as new independent firms sprung up to keep that sector thriving. We’re not saying PlayTreks is the next Awal, but it’s one of the newest companies to […]

CrowdTangle, which was bought by Facebook in 2017, is a tool for media publishers and content creators to track how content spreads online, and to see what content their target audience engages with. CrowdTangle is free to use and can be used – to a certain extent – by anyone, but the platform’s full analytics […]

In February this year, Google’s experimental division Area 120 launched something called Demand, in partnership with Pollstar. It was a live-music analytics tool promising “actionable, real-time analytics facilitating better planning, pricing, marketing and sponsorship of live events through data in four key areas: trends, pricing, announcements and insights”. Which sounded good, right up until the live […]

With so much analytic data for artists and their teams to chew over, their challenge is digesting this data in a way that delivers insight and helps grow an artist’s career. Viberate provides a comprehensive and versatile ecosystem of analytics for artists, labels and promoters alike, with a blend of features similar to those offered […]

Music marketing platform Linkfire has announced its latest data deal, with YouTube Music. “In addition to seeing how many of your link visitors click through to YouTube and YouTube Music, you’ll be able to see how those clicks translate into streams on the platforms,” promised the company. It makes YouTube the latest service to sign on […]

The ‘will streaming kill radio’ debate rumbles on, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet: radio airplay remains important for many artists, and tracking it globally remains a challenge. We’ve written about startups like World Airplay Radio Monitor (Warm) in the past, and now there’s a new contender: Maltese startup Radio Tools. It’s analysing the music played on more […]

Twitch has been doing more with music and musicians, and analytics firm Chartmetric has been tracking that. The result is four new charts for music on Amazon’s live-video platform, presenting the top users by viewer hours both weekly and monthly, as well as the top users by followers both weekly and all-time. Chartmetric says it’s […]

Based in our London office, Domino seeks a Head of Digital Partnerships & Analytics to lead digital commercial strategy across the Label Group. The role will monitor, explore and execute opportunities for Domino’s global digital business and operations. We are open to considering applications on a full-time or part-time basis, dependent on the candidates’ existing […]

With the huge number of platforms out there driving the success of modern marketing campaigns, it is increasingly challenging to get the full picture of how a campaign is performing and to then decide where to invest or what to amend. Wavo aims to solve this problem for those investing in artist development and marketing, […]

While each of the major DSPs has launched their own suite of analytics and data dashboards, the competition around who is providing the most actionable and unique set of insights is getting fiercer and fiercer, with each platform leveraging their own strengths and building on what they already offer. Hoping to raise the bar further […]

Lead: Music-centric filters on social apps are designed to appeal not just to hardcore fans but also to get enough “shareability” to pull in potential new fans. They are also being used by labels themselves to create a form of augmented branding. We look at who is doing them well, if they are worth the investment and […]

YouTube had analytics that musicians were using long before Spotify for Artists, Apple Music for Artists, Amazon Music for Artists and the rest. Along with SoundCloud, it was an early tool for artists to see (for example) where their fan hotspots were around the world, and plan tours accordingly. YouTube’s analytics weren’t specifically for musicians though: […]

On many levels, Amazon has already proven its worth in shaking up the music streaming business – not least because it offers the most diversified selection of subscription tiers to consumers. It also made headlines last year by propelling Ellie Goulding’s Amazon-exclusive (a cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘River’) to the top of the UK charts, […]

HypeAuditor has become a key tool in identifying fraudulent influencer accounts; now it has added a new influencer discovery tool, enabling those frequently working with influencers to promote artists/releases and to more easily find the right fit.  The platform says it has a database of 11m+ influencers across Instagram and YouTube, scraping information from publicly […]

After past acquisitions of music analytics startups Next Big Sound (by Pandora), Semetric and Asaii (both by Apple) the industry once again has a clutch of independent dashboards competing to help artists, managers and labels make sense of their streaming and social stats. We’ve written regularly about the likes of Soundcharts and Chartmetric, but the […]

With more than 55 million music streaming users around the world, most of whom are paying, Amazon is the third biggest player in the global music subscriptions market behind Spotify and Apple Music. One area in which it has lagged those rivals has been artist analytics: the data it provides artists and their teams on […]

Last year, Deezer became the first DSP to actively promote and test a user-centric payment system. At the same time, the streaming service began properly rolling out its own artist analytics backend, Deezer Backstage, with a freshly launched landing page and a host of innovative features. The last time Deezer publicly reported on its MAUs […]

Troy Carter was the closing keynote at Music Ally and Music Biz’s NY:LON Connect conference in New York on Friday. The former Atom Factory boss (where he managed Lady Gaga during her rise to fame) and Spotify exec is now running Q&A, a company blending artist development, distribution and technology. I interviewed Troy on-stage at […]

Universal Music Artists (UMA) is a new Android and iOS app for artists signed to Universal Music Group (and their managers) where they can access data and insights on their music plays on the major international DSPs – Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube are named in the announcement. However, it will also pull in data […]

On Saturday and Sunday (November 16-17), Capitol Music Group held its 2nd annual music and tech festival, Capitol Royale, at its Los Angeles headquarters. The theme for this year was ‘Music on the Move’, with workshops, hackathons, panels, and social events revolving around the ever-changing landscape of music and innovation. Kicking off on Friday was […]

Music-marketing firm Linkfire had a big announcement yesterday: it has a deal with Apple Music to provide more attribution data on what fans are doing on the streaming service after clicking or tapping through from artists’ smart-links. “No more guessing about streaming performance and fan engagement,” as Linkfire explained it in an email to its […]

Music Ally has covered analytics firm Chartmetric’s concept of Trigger Cities before but at Sandbox Summit in London this week, we assembled a panel of marketing experts to talk about the idea in practice and how – or if – it is changing the architecture of their global campaigns. Chaired by Isabelle Ljungqvist, digital marketing […]

Pex isn’t a startup we’ve written much about for Music Ally thus far, but it’s one of the more interesting companies in the current music ecosystem – not just because of what it’s doing now, but for how its technology might be used in the future. The company’s business is “independent video and music analytics and […]

Music-analytics platform Soundcharts has a new feature: ‘Mentions’. It promises ‘global media and web monitoring’ for artists, tracking where they’re mentioned in three categories of media: ‘music media’, ‘verified media’ and ‘unverified sources’. Artists will be able to dig in to the data by country; traffic rankings; and sources like news sites, blogs and discussions. […]

In early October 2018, Spotify launched a version of its analytics for podcasters, offering data on their listeners, ‘starts’ and streams – in beta. Now the tool is coming out of beta, and is thus available to anyone distributing their podcast through Spotify. More than 100k podcasts are already accessing the data through its beta, Spotify […]

We’ve heard regular praise for Apple Music’s analytics tools since they launched in 2018 as a beta version. Now the dashboard is coming out of beta and is open to all artists. Also new: there’s an iPhone app for the service alongside its website, matching the strategy adopted by Spotify for its own analytics. That rivalry […]

How much money does YouTube make? The New York Times offers a carefully-vague suggestion in its latest article about Alphabet’s video service: “YouTube probably generates $16 billion to $25 billion in annual revenue, making the video service big enough to crack the top half of the Fortune 500.” The ‘probably’ actually illustrates the main thrust of the […]

Twitter has launched a new analytics tool for people and companies posting video on its platform. It’s called Timing is Everything, and we think it could be quite useful for musicians. “Timing is Everything displays historical data showing when audiences are on Twitter watching and engaging with video,” explained Twitter in an announcement blogpost. That means whoever […]