Don’t Split the Streams — Part 6 — Searching for Consolidated, Purposeful, Actionable Streaming Music Data
Don’t Split The Streams is an ongoing blog series covering music marketing topics. It specifically focuses on maximizing stream counts and download sales on specific streaming services and retailers such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Beatport, Traxsource etc.
In the previous installment of this series, I detailed seven reasons independent artists and / or their marketing and management teams should focus their marketing efforts on specific streaming services versus being scattershot across the entire world of music retail sales and streaming.
Music Business Researcher and Analyst Keith Jopling of MIDiA Research recently wrote an article for Hypebot called “How Should We Measure An Artist’s Success On 2021?”. The opening sentence of Jopling’s piece reveals a question this blog series “Don’t Split The Streams” is trying to answer — how do we get to a single metric to measure the performance of a song in terms of streams and sales — either in the larger world of music or within a specific niche or genre? Jopling writes:
Combine a fractured global fanscape with an explosion in data and the idea of a single measure of artist success looks less relevant and meaningful
What streaming and sales data is available that consolidates the consumption of an artist’s music across platforms?
Unfortunately, if an independent artist (and / or their marketing team or music manager) wants to see a song’s overall performance from all the music services and retailers in one single dashboard, they would need to sign up for a pricey subscription service offered by one of the two major music data firms — MRC Data or Alpha Data. From what I understand, we are talking at least $1000 a month per user for access to either service.
Disclosure — from 2017–2019 I worked at Gracenote, which shared a business unit with Nielsen Music, now MRC, so I have some idea of the pricing — it’s just an estimate, and is probably outdated. Alpha Data I reached out to for a demo of their platform and to get pricing but never heard back from them.
One of the reasons an MRC subscription is priced at that level, is you would be able to see the entire world of streaming and sales data with such a subscription. Also keep in mind that MRC maintains extensive technology and business partnerships, to keep the data from the major streaming services flowing into their platform.
MRC Data powers the Billboard Charts, Hot 100, Top 200, and so on.
MRC Data’s origin begins as an independent company called Soundscan. Soundscan is point of sale data gathered at record stores — how many vinyl records and CDs does an artist sell. Nielsen acquired Soundscan and created the Nielsen Music group which later included streaming consumption data. Nielsen Music was acquired in late 2019 by Valence Media, the parent company of the music business magazine Billboard, and renamed MRC Data. Therefore, MRC Data has a long track record of collecting music sales data.
Meanwhile, Alpha Data began it’s life as BuzzAngle Music in 2013 and can be considered the new kid on the block in terms of music streaming and sales data. It’s owned by publisher Penske Media. While MRC Data powers the Billboard charts, while Alpha Data powers the Rolling Stone magazine music charts.
Well now, MRC Data and Alpha Data are now bundled together in corporate joint venture. It’s unclear if these two distinct music data services will be merged, or if one will take precedence over the other. For instance, MRC Music Data would live on but maybe Alpha Data would see it’s end of life, or vice a versa.
Most independent artists and their teams are not going to pay for this enterprise level access to music data provided by MRC or Alpha Data. While that means they would miss out on the ability to see the entire world of music sales and streaming data, an independent artist should expect that their music distributor will have consolidated streaming statistics for their songs. If an independent artist is signed to a label using a music distributor, they will have to ask their label to grant them access to the consolidated data, which usually appears in a distributor’s user dashboard.
For example, the music group I lead — FSQ — we are signed to a Soul Clap Records — which uses InGrooves as a music distributor.
Note, the InGrooves dashboard pictured above for FSQ does NOT show our performance at the music retailers like Traxsource and Beatport.
MRC Data excels because it will show the retail sales stats along side the streaming stats.
Also YouTube analytics are not shown in this InGrooves dashboard, which is a big miss considering our InGrooves releases are distributed to YouTube as official audio. Music fans are on YouTube consuming albums, EPs and singles there, plus music videos, so those stats are important. The YouTube analytics can be found separately via an artist’s YouTube Official Artist Channel’s “Studio” dashboard.
Regardless of some data missing from the InGrooves dashboard, what is really great is that you can get down to the individual song level and see consumption stats across platforms in a single view including — Apple Music, Deezer, Spotify, and Amazon Music. More importantly, the InGrooves dashboard helps artists understand what listening activities driving consumption. The activities falls into four categories — Playlists, Streaming Radio, Collections, and Other:
Playlists: an individual listener is streaming an artist’s songs within playlists — either created by a music editor employed by the streaming service, or by a 3rd party playlist curator.
Streaming Radio: major streaming services allow listeners to start a “radio” experience based on a particular song or artist name. This is also known as algorithmic radio — it will keep playing songs based on related artists and songs based on the initial seed of the radio station. If an artist’s songs are played during this radio experience, they are counted as played the under “streaming radio” banner.
Collections: Beyond adding songs to playlists, listeners on streaming services can favorite, like, or heart a song (while these terms are interchangeable, they are called different names on various music streaming services). They can also “save” songs, EPs, and albums to their “collections” so that they can play the music when not connected to the music service via the internet; this is known as “offline listening mode”. Songs streamed under the banner of “collections” means the songs were played via the “saved” or “liked” song collections of individual listeners. Songs streamed under the banner of “Collections” carry a bit more weight than any other type of streaming activity, because it means the listener took an explicit action to play an artist’s songs versus just passively listening to the songs via playlists or algorithmic radio.
Other: They are a myriad of ways a listener can play music on a streaming service beyond via a listener’s “collections”, a listener engaging with a playlist or using algorithmic streaming radio. Streams categorized as “other” could simply just be driven by listeners searching for particular artists or songs and playing the music. Some listeners just visit an individual artist page and stream from there, or check out “related artists” on an artist page, click through and stream the music of related artists.
The Ingrooves analytics dashboard is a big time saver — instead of having to login to each individual streaming service’s “For Artists” dashboard to see performance on an specific platform, you can compare how a particular song is doing at three different major streaming services at once: Apple Music, Spotify, and Deezer. Google Music is no longer, and I’m interested to see if Amazon Music comes to this InGrooves dashboard sometime soon.
Self serve distributors like CD Baby, DistroKid, Tunecore, will consolidate the streaming stats that you find in the major streaming artist platforms (example Spotify, Amazon, Apple “for Artists” platforms) but you may be charged a premium, and do not expect to find every streaming service within these distributor led dashboards. I have not fully explored the world of self serve distributors and their corresponding artist analytics platforms. CD Baby’s artist analytics platform dashboard looks good and is free to artists using their distribution service. However, data in the CD Baby dashboard is limited to Apple Music, Apple iTunes Sales and Spotify data.
Meanwhile at independent distributor OneRPM, their streaming data dashboard is made up of streaming consumption data from Spotify, Apple Music — and wait for it — VKontakte — a Russian social network that now also has a streaming music service.
A music distributor with a flow of daily consolidated streaming analytics and sales data requires the distributor and the streaming services have strong partnerships, and the proper technology to consistently deliver the data to the dashboard.
Reminder — stream count stats aren’t the same as the income reports that come in every few months from the music services delivered to the distributors.
It’s a lot of partnership and technology work for both the streaming service and the digital distributor. That is why consolidated music data outside of MRC and Alpha Data platforms is usually limited to the data from only 2–4 streaming services per a music distributor’s artist analytics dashboard.
So likely artists will need to go to each individual streaming service where their music resides, to get the most comprehensive view of their artist analytics. Note, some streaming services just simply do not offer stream counts to artists — specifically — one big one is TIDAL. TIDAL reports an artist’s revenue generated by streaming on the service, and that revenue is delivered to artists’ accounts at the music distributors. TIDAL’s stream counts for artists or any other data point from a world of possible artist analytics are simply not available.
While an artist would posit they are receiving the most detailed artist analytics via the artist dashboards on the streaming services, music marketer Steve Mann of Adapter Marketing points out ..
Steve Mann believes the streaming services are not doing the work to deliver audience analytics as much as the major platforms have — Google, Facebook Business, and e-commerce players like Shopify. I certainly agree with Steve, but as a person who started off his music career sending off CDs to college radio stations without any return path data telling me if the music was played, I do feel there’s a lot of important data there to work with and analyze.
Yet consolidating an artist’s streaming and sales data is difficult, and even if you have an expedient method for gathering it all in one place, the combined metrics won’t necessarily be translatable to the rest of the music world.
MIDIA Analyst Keith Jopling pointedly asks “Can [an artist’s] success be collectively measured anymore?”. In Jopling’s piece for Hypebot, he also shares an anecdote regarding one music manager client he consults, who told him the goal for the artist they are managing is “They really want a no. 1”.
The request makes sense because, with MRC / Alpha Data being the only game in terms of consolidating streaming data and building published music charts around said data, that’s really the only visible public metric, “a no. 1” — and if not at number one, at least appearing somewhere on the Billboard Hot 100, or on another Billboard chart. There is a Billboard chart tracking artists on the rise — many of whom could be or are independent artists, though many artists appearing on this chart have already secured major record label deals. Behold the Billboard “Emerging Artists Chart”.
Chartmetric is a paid subscription artist analytics service I mention several times in the previous installments of my “Don’t Split The Streams” series. Chartmetric offers subscribers to their service music consumption data from a myriad of sources. The company’s offering do NOT include sales and streaming data, so it’s not the answer to figuring out how to put an artist’s streaming and sales data in one place, like one could expect with a music distributor artist analytics dashboard or a MRC / Alpha Data solution.
Chartmetric measures a bunch of social media signals related to the consumption of an artist’s music on platforms including Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, and more importantly inclusion of an artist’s songs within playlists on a myriad of streaming services. Plus Chartmetric is monitoring radio airplay. With this large slate of music data, Chartmetric offers a metric called “CPP” or “Cross Platform Performance”.
Former Disney star Olivia Rodrigo has a major #1 hit with her first single release “Driver’s License”. Since Olivia is already a known star, her CPP ranking was hovering around 2,000 before the single release. In comparison, our music group FSQ, we are ranked at 300,000. When “Driver’s License” dropped Olivia jumped into the top 50 artists as ranked Charmetric’s CPP.
At the time of writing this post, Olivia sits at #57 near other mega star artists, Future, Halsey, Calvin Harris and Chris Brown.
If an artist or their team is monitoring their CPP performance, they should know what is driving large increases where an artist jumps thousands of points up in the rankings. For instance, with Olivia Rodrigo’s new hit, it’s obvious why she jumped from about 2000 to 50 in CPP rankings. For my music group FSQ, where we sit at a ranking 300,000 — I have no idea what drove us to jump up to 35,000–-10x higher! — briefly for a week in October and again December of 2020 as we had no new music etc or live streaming activity. It’s possible inclusion in some year end charts / rankings due to our summer 2020 album release pushed us up in December, but I do not see anything obvious.
I felt that these data points are aberrations and I reached out to Chartmetric to see if they would have any insight. Chartmetric said the December pop was due to an inclusion of one of our songs in a playlist by record label and tastemaker Kitsune.
Meanwhile, I am currently working on an album release marketing campaign for dance music duo Soul Clap. Their CPP is up and down — and goes up every time they have a music release. Obviously they aren’t touring now so you can closely track the rise to the release of new music, playlist inclusion and livestreams.
Here’s a good example of CPP attribution to artist activity: Soul Clap recently bounced from about 35,000 to 7,000 due to the release of their EP, WORLD. Soul Clap is also trailblazing the way on Twitch.tv doing up to 5 live streams a week on the platform, and we can also see that as part of the reason for the increase.
Ranking in at around 7,100 right now, Soul Clap is surrounded by some notable artists including ska legends The Specials and jazz piano maestro Oscar Peterson.
Note that Chartmetric is assigning music genre tags to the artists it’s tracking in the platform. Given hundreds of thousands of artists are assigned a CPP ranking, it would be much more meaningful if Chartmetric would create CPP charts based on genre.
Outside of a few major music genres that Billboard tracks — Pop, Country, Rock, R&B/Hip-Hop, Latin, Dance/Electronic, and a few others — music genre based charts are hard to find. Meanwhile Beatport, Juno Download, and Traxsource do a great job of tracking sales of smaller but important genres within the larger umbrella of “Dance / Electronic”. If you want to see who’s leading “Tech House”, “Nu-Disco”, or “Soul / Funk / Disco” genres, you can expect these music retailers have charts tailored to these specific dance music segments.
The amount of descriptive metadata available about music artists and specific songs and their respective genre categories points towards companies like MRC Data and Chartmetric being able to offer up detailed music genre charts. (Descriptive metadata includes the genre of a song, and also mood like “energetic”, “sad”, etc). Even when songs do not carry a genre metadata tag — machine learning systems offered by Gracenote and Musiio can automatically categorize the real genre a song, or by listening to the entire catalog of an artist, assign said artist an overall genre.
While Keith Jopling’s post details why top music charts are less relevant to the music industry in 2021, I believe they could be much more relevant if we could examine what artists are leading in their main musical genre, or what songs are the top ones within the genre the songs most reflect.
You can find top sales charts by genre at Apple Music’s retail counterpart — yes that is still called iTunes — and this data is reported into 3rd party artist analytics platforms like Chartmetric, Soundcharts, and Songstats. For instance, Songstats is aggregating when FSQ appears on iTunes genre focused sales charts (charts that measure the amount paid downloads, a consumer activity that only accounts for less than 10% of all music revenues).
Do you desire more music charts based on genre? Music retailer Traxsource annually rounds up the top 200 tunes in specific genres within the dance world.
When it comes to streaming platforms, Apple Music and Spotify offer charts with the top tunes in terms of streaming by nation, but not by genre.
Playlist curators will try to convince listeners that they are the ultimate authority on what songs are leading particular music genres, but these playlists that are labeled “charts”, have no relation to real streaming consumption on the major platforms.
Some of these playlists do mirror the sales charts of other providers. For instance, a search for playlists called “Top House Chart” on Spotify, turns up a few playlists that are organized against the results of the real Traxsource genre sales charts (see bottom row of screen shot).
The major streaming services are curating “Best of Genre X” playlists which will give songs in these genres a MAJOR boost in terms of streaming consumption, but these lists are curated by editors and again are not representative of ranking songs in a genre by their actual stream counts.
Spotify is also making a big push to organize their playlists by “mood” versus just genre.
Can you imagine top charts organized around moods or activities, like “Top Songs Being Streamed During Gaming”? It’s a thought, but music charts today aren’t even covering popular niche genres yet.
Everynoise.com — a website created by an engineer at Spotify — started tracking something like 1,600 music genres in 2016. Today the site has over 5,000 music genres listed. The nichefication of music genres is a huge industry trend.
These specific niches are becoming very successful with listeners — take one of the biggest genre hits of 2020 — the genre known as “Lo-Fi Hip Hop” — which Wikipedia defines here.
- In February 2020 ChilledCow’s flagship “Lo-fi Hip Hop” Spotify playlist had 1.2m followers; in autumn 2020 it has 4.3m, enough to make it the most popular 3rd party playlist on the platform
- Pepsi launches launched its own ‘LoFi Radio: Beats To Sip To‘ stream on YouTube
- More about the “Lo-Fi Hip Hop” 2020 genre boom here…
Other niche genres that became even more popular in 2020: K-Pop, Hyperpop, and Vaporwave.
Also genre growth is being driven by regional genres on popular streaming services within specific regions. A few examples:
- 63% of Boomplay Africa’s Top 100 tracks are Afrobeat
- Gaana India — 185m users today, 30% market share of music streaming in India; aiming for 500m in 3 years ; Hindi, and Punjabi language music are #1 and #2 growing genres on the service
Meanwhile, artists practicing in these niche genres are becoming more popular with listeners. More than 60,000 artists had more than 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify at some point during 2020. That’s up 42% from 42,000 in 2019.
Wrapping up part 6 of “Don’t Split The Streams” — in conclusion, I believe music charts are important but they have not diversified enough yet to match the incredible explosion of genres and artists practicing in them.
Furthermore, the inability of artists and their marketing teams to consolidate their streaming and sales data and match that data against their peers creates an environment where it’s hard to measure success. As Keith Jopling asks “where is the centre of success for music artists as we approach 2021?”
I believe Chartmetric today comes the closest to creating some kind of overall artist success metric with their CPP, but the ranking is artist centric and NOT song centric. Furthermore, it is not filterable by music genre. A CPP ranking by genre would be supremely valuable, though I imagine some artists would start to “genre”-ify themselves, producing music only in single genres to get to the top of the rankings. Like can you imagine someone trying to be the #1 gabber (a music genre) artist? (LOL)
I will be keeping a close eye on Chartmetric’s CPP to see if they wind up developing any genre focused CPP rankings.
Meanwhile, MRC Data and Alpha Data are great tools if an artist is needing to view their streaming and sales data consolidated in a single dashboard. But with such power comes great cost. Since MRC and Alpha Data let you view the streaming and sales data of all artists, you can do some comparisons to the results other artists within their dashboards.
What remains to be seen with MRC and Alpha Data is if they will combine their technology and efforts now that they are under a joint venture.
Unfortunately, the resulting charts from these services — Billboard and Rolling Stone — seem monolithic, tied to broad music genres. Considering the availability of data about booming, fresh niche music genres, the music industry watchers including me hope to see some chart additions soon.
In the next part of the “Don’t Split The Streams”, part 7, I take a deeper dive into third party music analytics services like Chartmetric, Songstats, SoundCharts, WARM Radio, Radio Tools, Beattracker, Apple Music for Artists’ Shazam and how to aggregate the data offered on these stand alone platforms, and convert it into consolidated stats, with the goal of telling a cohesive story about the consumption of an artist’s music.
For now here’s a brief post I wrote about this kind of approach, titled “Mapping Shazam Data to SoundCharts Radio Airplay” …
