The head of a music data analytics company has explained how he is playing “moneyball” with the music industry.
Next Big Sound chief executive Alex White told an audience at the Web Summit how the company uses public social data to understand which music artists are going to be popular before they actually are.
White predicted the possible meteoric rise of four artists over the next year: DJs Alesso and Dillon Francis and recording artists Jasmine V and Teyana Taylor.
“These are the four artists that have the highest likelihood of success based on the data. It’ll be interesting to see over the next six to 12 months how this plays out. It’s not a perfect science, but we’re getting there,” said White.
His company's data analytics predicted the recent rise of both Iggy Azalea and Sam Smith.
“Sam Smith charted on our ‘next big sound’ chart in July 2013. Earlier this year, he hit our marker for an 80 per cent likelihood of success. He debuted number two on the Billboard Top 200 chart this year. He had 700 million Vebo video views, placing him at epic artist stage. It was an astronomical amount of activity.”
White called the company’s method a “social crystal ball” that helps music industry clients decide which artists or songs to promote based on what fans are reacting to in the marketplace. “It’s a data-driven approach to marketing,” he said.
The company has a huge amount of historical data after tracking the online music activity for every artist in the world for the past five years. In the first nine months of 2014, they tracked 260 billion plays or streams across social media.
“We look collectively across the whole planet and see what everyone is watching, listening to, reacting to. We’re able to see the broad patterns emerging.”
The data has spoken, and it said the music industry is extremely difficult to crack.
“We thought it would follow the 80/20 rule, where 80 per cent of people listen to 20 per cent of artists.” What White found, however, was the vast majority of fans followed only one per cent of musicians.
“Music is a hits-driven business. Increasingly, we’re liking a cluster of artists at the top of the chain,” White said.
