On this episode, we chat with Aileen Crowley, former Vice President of Global Streaming Marketing at Universal Music Group. Before leaving the major label world in November 2020, Aileen devised data-driven streaming strategy for developing artists, working directly with artist management to translate streaming analytics, develop artist release strategies, and implement plans for audience growth. 

Prior to that, Aileen was the General Manager of DigSin, a subscription-based independent music label focused on singles, playlisting, and data, as well as being an artist manager—and that was after spending almost seven years at world-renowned consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Today, Aileen runs The Streaming Story, a website dedicated to contextualizing streaming success with the narrative surrounding that success. Since recording this interview, Aileen has teamed up with Lark42, a digital consultancy that solves hard problems in the music, data, blockchain, streaming and startup space. You can connect with Aileen on LinkedIn here. If you want more free insights, follow our podcast, our blog, and our socials. If you're an artist with a free Chartmetric account, sign up for the artist plan, made exclusively for you, here. If you're new to Chartmetric, follow the URL above after creating a free account here.

On this episode, we chat with Tommaso Rocchi, a 2020 Master of Arts graduate of The Global Entertainment and Music Business program at Berklee College of Music in Valencia, Spain. As a former college radio Music Director at the University of Padua in northern Italy, Rocchi then moved on to Berklee to focus on copyright law, new business models, and data analytics.

In September 2020, Rocchi penned a Chartmetric article entitled “How Data is Redefining the Role of A&R in the Music Industry Today,” based off of his research at Berklee. It focuses on where the field of A&R has gone in the digital era from its analog roots, and how data plays a significant role, but should never replace the human side of how professionals operate.

Rocchi is currently a Project Manager for Data and Analytics at Netherlands-based classical music label PENTATONE.

Connect with Tommaso: LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram Read "How Data is Redefining the Role of A&R in the Music Industry Today" here. If you want more free insights, follow our podcast, our blog, and our socials. If you're an artist with a free Chartmetric account, sign up for the artist plan, made exclusively for you, here. If you're new to Chartmetric, follow the URL above after creating a free account here.

On this episode, we talk to Adam Kanwal about the article he wrote for the Chartmetric blog entitled, How to Promote Your Music in Southeast Asian Trigger Cities. Kanwal is a Digital Marketing and Analytics Consultant, working with artists including Amorphous, Still Woozy, Remi Wolf, Suzuki Saint, and Miss Madeline to analyze TikTok and YouTube trajectories, building campaigns from the ground up. He’s formed partnerships with over one hundred influencers globally, and has also served as the Digital Marketing Specialist for Shifted Recording in New York City.

He’s a 2021 graduate from Cornell University in New York, with a background in Human Development, and minoring in International Relations and Music. His primary interests are in creating psychologically smart, culturally relevant, and globally reverberating digital marketing campaigns for up-and-coming musical artists. Read How to Promote Your Music in Southeast Asian Trigger Cities here. If you want more free insights, follow our podcast, our blog, and our socials. If you're an artist with a free Chartmetric account, sign up for the artist plan, made exclusively for you, here. If you're new to Chartmetric, follow the URL above after creating a free account here.

Cullah is a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, based independent musician who has released an album every year on his birthday — April 27 — for the past 14 years. For his 30th birthday in 2021, he’ll be releasing his 15th album, ½, as a testament to the fact that he’s released an album every year for half of his life. The son of a classically trained jazz musician and a farm-raised mathematician and computer scientist, “Cullah was brought up with the awareness of the balance between the creative and logical aspects of natural law.” As such, he studied Computer Engineering at Marquette University and Music and Media Technologies at Trinity College Dublin, working briefly as a web developer at a web design firm before turning to music full time. He’s been described as, “One part Jack White, one part Dan Auerbach, and one part Jeff Buckley,” and he was kind enough to carve out some time to discuss music data and music analytics from the artist perspective. Connect With Cullah Here If you want more free insights, follow our podcast, our blog, and our socials. If you're an artist with a free Chartmetric account, sign up for the artist plan, made exclusively for you, here. If you're new to Chartmetric, follow the URL above after creating a free account here.

If you haven’t heard the news, we’ve recently become the first third-party music analytics company to host Pandora data publicly, which includes stream counts, monthly listeners, and station adds for hundreds of thousands of artists. So, we’re especially excited about our guests today: Dan Wissinger and Jay Troop. Dan is currently a Senior Product Manager at Pandora, where he spearheads the Next Big Sound and AMP product teams, and Jay is a Senior Analyst for Next Big Sound and AMP. He’s also responsible for Artist & Industry Insights at Pandora writ large. On this episode, we introduce you to Dan, Jay, and Pandora; explain why Pandora matters to the music industry and to artists’ careers; and give you some strategies for making sense of your Pandora data. Speaking of which, if you’re not familiar with Next Big Sound, it’s the OG in music analytics, so we highly suggest checking it out as soon as you can, and the same goes for AMP, which is an artist’s best friend on Pandora. Connect With Us (@chartmetric)http://chartmetric.com/https://blog.chartmetric.comhttps://smarturl.it/chartmetric_social

On this episode, we chat with Emily White, a music industry veteran who started her career as a world class tour manager before retiring at 23 to pursue artist management, entrepreneurial endeavors, and academia. Emily has worked with everyone from Dinosaur Jr. to Zac Brown Band, she’s founded and run multiple entertainment companies, released a number of books, and now, when she’s not teaching at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Emily is using music data analytics to help activate voters for the upcoming presidential election in November. The #iVoted initiative, which Emily founded with Madison House co-founder Mike Luba and Wilco’s Pat Sansone, is gearing up to be one of the biggest digital music festivals ever, with dozens of artists performing via webcast nationwide. The cost of admission for fans? A selfie from home with their mail-in ballot or a photo from outside their polling place, though we strongly encourage the former. For a full list of artists performing on Nov. 3, check out iVotedConcerts.com, and full disclaimer: Chartmetric is a proud data partner of the #iVoted initiative. Connect With Emilyhttps://twitter.com/emwizzle https://twitter.com/iVotedConcerts https://twitter.com/collectiveent_ https://www.instagram.com/collectiveentinc/ Connect With Ushttp://podcast.chartmetric.com/http://chartmetric.com/https://blog.chartmetric.comhttps://smarturl.it/chartmetric_social

Highlights  Spotify, Apple Music, and Deezer’s biggest playlists are growing — both in terms of follower count and also track count — but what does that mean for artists looking to land a big add?Mission   Good morning, it’s Rutger here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.We’re on the socials at “chartmetric”, that’s Chartmetric, no “S ”- follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, and talk to us! We’d love to hear from you.Feature: Labels PageHey Rutger, it’s Jason — sorry to interrupt, but can I just do a quick product update? Of course, what’s up?Thanks, man. Hi Chartmetric fans, you may or may not have gotten a chance to check out the new Labels Page feature that we discussed in the last podcast episode this week.We’ve temporarily pulled the feature back from its soft release because we just don’t think it’s up to the music analytics standard we strive for.If you’ve been with us for some time, you’ve seen how dedicated we are to innovating and as we say in the tech world, sometimes “breaking things”.Well, we’ve gotten a lot of your feedback and realize that we jumped the gun a bit early and we need to better clean, organize and visualize the label metadata that we have, which is what we do best.So we recognize the issue, and we are working swiftly to bring the Labels Page back with verve and more importantly, accuracy!Back to our regularly scheduled program, take it away, Rutger!Thanks, Jason!DateThis is your Data Dump for Friday, August 2nd, 2019.How 2019’s Playlist Growth Might Affect Emerging ArtistsThese days, getting onto streaming’s top playlists is sort of the name of the game.It really determines the visibility of emerging artists and cements the longevity of established ones.So, it got us wondering…. What’s been going on on the top playlists in 2019?Hitting the Playlists tab on the Chartmetric homepage brings up tons of playlist information for Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, and Amazon.From there, we can compare everything going on when it comes to the playlists claiming the top spots across a number of different measurements.On Spotify, Today’s Top Hits maintains the highest follow number, starting the year off with 22.3M and hitting 23.6M by the end of June.That’s 5.8 percent increase for that six month period.On Deezer, Les Titres Du Moment claims the top follower spot, and over the same period, experienced only about 1 percent growth from 9.8M followers to 9.9M followers.Digging in a bit deeper, we can also compare playlist length, aka number of tracks.For that six month period, for example, Spotify’s Hot Country playlist grew 31.4 percent in length, while Apple Music’s The A-List: Pop playlist grew the same amount.But those aren’t the highest numbers. Spotify’s EDM-focused Mint playlist grew 35.8 percent, and Apple’s Hip-Hop-oriented Gymflow playlist grew 66.7 percent.Overall, Apple added more tracks to its top playlists than Spotify did — about 11 percent vs. 23 percent, to be exact. The growth of these playlists, both in terms of follower count and also track count, means a higher chance of an emerging artist landing on one of them and a significant increase in visibility if they do.However, it also makes it more likely that they get lost in the noise, making it hard to capitalize on an otherwise super exciting add.Knowing the genre breakdown of tracks and also the country distribution of artists can help, but we’ll have to save that for another episode. You can also tell us what you find by doing your own digging at chartmetric.com!Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday, August 2nd, 2019. This is Rutger from Chartmetric.Article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comAnd if you like what we’re doing, don’t forget to leave us a rating or review!Happy Friday, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you next week!

Highlights  Fake streams! Playlist manipulation! Fake artists! There’s a lot of buzz about it, but what does this look like in the data?Mission   Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.DateThis is your Data Dump for Friday, June 28th, 2019.Enter the World of Streaming ManipulationLast week’s streaming code of conduct was signed by more than 20 major companies across the industry to combat streaming fraud, which is good for artist compensation and more forthcoming to the fans.How can we think about this prickly topic from a music data perspective? And when we say “this”, it’s not just fake streams. It’s also playlist manipulation and fake artist accounts.For sure, we are in very murky waters, and there is little actual data on the phenomenon.Recently American indie label Hopeless Records estimated 3-4 percent of global streams could be fraudulent.But a 2015 MBW article mentions how 60% or more Twitter followers on top artist accounts could also be fake.Granted, these are different types of fraudulent behavior, but it’s also a huge delta to try to account for.What we can do though is search for red flags in the music data available to us.For example: if we look at playlist manipulation, here’s one way to look at the data to try to identify potentially iffy behavior:We scanned the playlist charts looking for abnormally high 28-day follower increases, and found a non-editorial hip-hop genre playlist with a 262% increase in followers in the past month.While that could just be great marketing, currently having 110K followers-an impressive number-its max artist monthly listeners, however, is only ~470, which doesn’t seem to match up.This means that the only artist on the playlist that gets a lot of its unique listeners from here is getting less than 1% of its supposed followers actually listening to them.Again, possible, especially since the playlist has about 100 current tracks on it, but it’s ranked in the first third of the playlist, so it’s not likely.That artist, which only has a little over 200 followers, is playlisted among high-profile artists like Eminem, Kanye West and Cardi B, presumably to draw traffic, which would be smart marketing if done legitimately, but if so many followers are not streaming the actual tracks...it smells a little fishy.If that weren’t enough, there’s a three-piece pop band with only 16 followers, and two other rap artists who have 4 and 17 Spotify followers, respectively.All three have their listed label as a series of numbers, then “Records DK” or “DK2”, which is a default label for the distributor DistroKid, if left untouched.DistroKid is one of the most popular digital distributors available to independent artists and an official partner distributor with Spotify.If that still isn’t enough, all the playlist album artwork looks like carbon copies of official Spotify playlist album art. Again, good marketing tactic...or borderline deception?So while it’s admittedly an analytical leap, it is very possible that a playlist curator is buying illegitimate playlist followers to make themselves look good, they dupe unknowing artists into thinking they are getting amazing exposure, and the curator gets paid accordingly and in our opinion, unfairly.We could be completely 100% wrong on this, but the point is, there are certain ways you can look at the music data to try to suss out what’s likely real, and what at least should raise some red flags.We’ll try to unpack some other types of illegitimate activity from a data perspective next week.Outro That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Friday, June 28th, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Do you know how NPR does their ask for donations every so often? That’s what we’re about to do now! But we’re just asking for an Apple Podcasts rating.Rutger and I put at least a few hours a day into each episode, researching, writing, editing, recording, editing again, publishing to multiple platforms, checking analytics...and it’d be really cool for us to get some feedback on how we’re doing: the good/bad/ugly. So it’d only takes a few thumb swipes out of your day, and you’d be sending us so much joy: we’d appreciate it.As always, free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Friday, have a great weekend, and see you on Monday!