Our friends at Drop.Show has launched a new tool to get an overview of your artist data in order to enhance your career in the music industry. Their services combine ads, SoMe, SEO, email marketing and web design. Read here if you want some tangible tools and advice.
New social media tools are revolutionising the world in general and the music industry in particular. But do you already know how to get the most out of them?
Social media and music streaming platforms have exposed the numbers of the music and artists in full view of the world. Never before we have seen them so clearly to make better decisions. Now it is easy to know which artist is the one that is growing the most, how many listeners they have and even where those listeners live.
The important thing about all this is that they are objective data.
A few years ago, the media or the general public determined the popularity of an artist. And that conception could be applied to an entire country. The problem is that the countries are large, they are made up of areas with particular cultures that do not have to coincide with each other. So the success of an artist in one place does not mean that they remain popular in another part of the country.
For one thing, this cost many promoters money. At the same time, it could discourage many emerging groups, who saw how they had to play, at times, for a few people.
Now, thanks to Big Data music, promoters, artists, managers and record labels can know exactly where the audience of a certain group is. Or where one musical genre or another is listened to more. Which is beneficial to all players involved in the music industry.
Surely if you organise concerts you will often look at the number of reproductions that a group or artist has on Spotify and YouTube, which are the main streaming services on demand.
But watch out for this. That an artist has many transmissions does not mean that the artist has a loyal followers. A high number of transmissions can be due to the entry of a song in a playlist where the song accumulates passive streams. The song or the artist may be momentarily fashionable or conditioned by some kind of hype.
Hype is important to sell tickets, but when organising a concert in the long-term it can be a problem.
In this sense, what is really important is engagement. That is to say, the fidelity that the public shows to an artist. Seeing the number of followers on Spotify or YouTube can be a good indicator. Since the listener who follows an artist shows more interest than the one who only listens to the songs. However, this is not 100% reliable either.
The best thing in this case is to know the history of the artist. Being able to see its evolution over the months to verify that it not only attracts the audience, but also maintains it over time. This information is essential when organising a successful concert. You will know that the artist or band has a fan base who are already listening to and are interested in their records, and not just the last popular song.
Finding that successful artist, knowing the background, and knowing where the supportive fanbase is can be a costly and time-consuming endeavour. However, at present, you have platforms that show you all that information at the moment, accurately and with a history that allows you to make the best decisions.
Among them Drop.Show, a platform characterised by how easy it is to display data, so that its interpretation is very simple and can be understood by all professionals in the sector without having to become an expert in data analysis.
As with streaming platforms, data on social media has to be interpreted carefully.
If you are thinking of working with an artist with a huge number of followers, you should think about the quality of those followers.
An account can have millions of followers, but these followers may not be real. Artists can easily buy followers to show better numbers on the profiles. Or the public is losing interest in that artist and her music. The important thing here is to see the amount of interactions they get on their profiles in relation to the number of followers they have. This is what is known as the engagement rate.
For example, if a band with 10,000 followers gets 4,000 interactions with each publication (like, comment, share…), she has a very good engagement rate. It therefore has a loyal audience. However, if with those 10,000 followers he only gets 200 interactions, that band does not move many followers, so you will have to be careful when working with them.
To calculate the engagement that an artist has on their social media, we must multiply the total number of interactions that has received by 100, and divide the result by the number of followers he or she has. The result will tell you if the artist has a strong fan base or not.
An engagement of 4% or more is considered a very good rate. Between 4% and 1% is good. And less than 1% is a very low figure.
Once you know if the artist you are thinking of working with has a good number of followers and a good engagement rate, you will only have to analyse where the audience is. This data cannot be obtained directly from the social platform. But for that there are tools like Drop.Show, which in addition to showing where the followers of these artists and groups live, will show you other types of demographic information such as the age of those followers or if the audience is mostly male or female.
This will help you a lot to segment your audience when you go to invest your money in running ads online campaigns. And of course, Drop.Show also automatically shows you the engagement rate that an artist has, so you don't have to calculate anything. Thus, you should only focus on whether that artist you are interested in hiring is your best option.
Social media and music streaming platforms are your best supports when making hiring decisions. You only need to know how to understand the data that you have at your disposal. Throughout this article you have learned how to analyse them to make the best decisions. Now you just have to collect data from different artists and compare them. The music industry has never been easier!
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