Why Music Analytics Tools Like Chartmetric Matter for Music Marketing and Music Promotion

Use case

Why Music Analytics Tools Matter for Digital Marketers in the Recording Industry

Music marketing (https://blog.chartmetric.com/how-to-promote-your-music/) and music promotion are fundamental to the music industry — especially on the recording side. While the majority of the industry’s history has largely consisted of physical marketing campaigns, with radio and television eventually coming into play as well, digital marketing is really a role that developed through the internet.

Get started now

Brief History of Digital Marketing in the Music Industry

As music itself has transitioned from physical to digital, digital marketing channels from email to social media and music blogs to search engines have become the predominant means for promoting artists and their music — and data analytics has become the yardstick for success.

Digital marketing, as we think of it today, is really a development of the last three decades. Both email and search engine technology laid the foundation for the field in the early ‘90s, with HotWired pioneering clickable banner ads in 1994.

That same year, Yahoo was born, and four years after that, Google, with cookie technology rising alongside them and giving birth to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

After the Dot-Com bubble popped in 2000, Web 2.0 spawned the Social Media Marketing (SMM) universe, email marketing at scale, and content marketing through blogs and vlogs. As the digital marketing industry ramped up in the early 2000s, Myspace, iTunes, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp started offering channels for artists to distribute and promote their music all on their own, opening up new avenues for the music industry to take with marketing music in an increasingly digital age.

As the music industry reeled from the dramatic decline of revenue following the rise of piracy and P2P sharing, streaming stepped in during the 2010s to fully digitize the music industry and make digital marketing one of the primary means by which record labels drive value to their rosters.

What Digital Marketing at a Record Label Looks Like Today

Naturally, social media is the primary digital marketing vertical through which artists build up and engage with their audience bases. Social media analytics, therefore, provide some of the best Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for record labels wanting to monitor how well their marketing strategies are working for their artists.

The same is true of streaming platforms as well, which provide immediate insights about audience behavior and listener engagement. But the digital marketing role involves much more than this at a record label, from maintaining website and blog content to determining ad spend and fostering relationships with the right playlist curators.

As such, much of the day-to-day for digital marketers involves tracking metrics and being able to distill many data points into actionable intelligence for the artists the label represents.

How Chartmetric can help

A comprehensive view of cross-platform data analytics gives music professionals the precise information they need to determine their ad spend, their demographic targets, and their geographic targets — data-based insights that are particularly important when it comes to playlisting, music and merchandise consumption, and tour booking.

How Chartmetric can help

Overview

Spotify Demographics

So, let’s say you’re about to create a targeted Instagram campaign to promote an artist’s latest release, but you’re tasked with developing a new fanbase. First, let’s hop on over to your artist’s page. Scroll down to their Audience tab to scan their Spotify Monthly Listeners or Daily YouTube Views at the city or country level for context.

Instagram demographics

Then, drill down to their Instagram follower demographics and check out their Top Cities. Are the Top 5 obvious? No sweat. If you hit the View More button, you can check for smaller, but still significant, Instagram traction.

YouTube demographics

From there, you can scroll to your artist’s YouTube demographics to cross-reference for validity and overlap. Now, you know exactly who your target audience is, and you can optimize your YouTube campaign accordingly.

Playlist opportunities

Or, if you’re more on the playlisting side of things, and you want to check what playlists might be best to match your artists with, click over to our Playlists tab and filter across a number of dimensions, from geography to genre, curator, and more. Speaking of curators, if you’re looking to diversify and expand your artist’s audience by getting some influential curators in their court, click over to our Curators tab, toggle the “Exclude Spotify and major label brands” filter and really drill down to a shortlist of the right curators for your artist by clicking the genre filter just to the left of that. Before long, you’ll be landing the big ones.