The Music Industry’s KPI Problem
The disparity of data, data services, and data literacy in the music industry
by Will Cubero
As an advertiser at ONErpm, I’ve invested a great deal of time working with artist data. A key part of advertising is showing your work, so having the data to back up your results is mission-critical. The biggest things I’ve noticed? Data in the music industry has some serious problems….
For most of 2024, I wore a WHOOP; a fitness tracking device that measures sleep and strain, among other things. As someone who struggles with sleep, I was interested in what I might learn about sleep hygiene and how I might improve it. Over the resulting months, I was floored by how much data there was to be gleaned from a tiny laser strapped to my wrist. Heart rate, blood pressure, and skin temperature are all tracked minute by minute to determine strain, recovery, sleep efficiency, and more. I was shocked by how useful, simple to understand, and actionable the data was; and I was left thinking: where the hell is all the genuinely helpful data in the music industry?
A Song is not a Body
The simple answer is that the medical community has determined key metrics that indicate your relative fitness level. A doctor can look at your blood pressure and resting heart rate and tell you your risk of a heart attack, because 100 years of medical data have proven these numbers to be reliable health indicators. These metrics, based on decades of research, are analogous to what the business world calls “Key Performance Indicators,” or KPIs.
So what about the music industry and our KPIs? Well, we like to think we have KPIs. We talk about monthly listeners and follower counts, and we all chase a gold or platinum record. We set goals. And sometimes we even call those goals KPIs. But a KPI is not a goal – it’s a figure that measures progress towards a goal. Resting heart rate is a KPI towards the goal of getting fit. But total number of YouTube subscribers is not a KPI towards the goal of getting a million YouTube subscribers.
The music industry is obsessed with performance, but we don’t really think much about progress.
Rates! Rates! Rates!
Save rate, view rate, skip rate, click-through rate. These are a few KPIs (not goals) I’ve found to be impactful when determining a song’s performance. The underlying factor here is the namesake of this section: rates.
Artists are obsessed with the big number. YouTube views, streams, likes, and follows – they love to see something hit 1 million. Any analyst will tell you these big figures mean very little out of context. An MLB slugger who hits 1 home run in 10 at-bats is Babe Ruth, 1 home run in 500 at-bats is roughly the MLB average. The music industry has yet to figure this out, yet to have its Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill Moneyball moment where we find the magic ratio that gets to the crux of musical success. And as long as we keep chasing the big number and avoiding things like rates, we’ll never be able to discern valuable data from vanity data.
The Data Gap
I’ve ragged on number-chasers in the last few sections, now it’s time to rag on everyone else.
In truth, part of the reason the industry loves a big number is because it’s the most accessible. In the same way that big companies and gatekeepers have primarily held the keys to success for artists, so too have they held the keys to the data.
Outside of a small handful of paid tools such as Chartmetric, which provides limited advanced analytics, most of the independent industry cannot view all their data in one place. Without the power of major labels gathering a century of data and querying it with bulk APIs (this sentence gave me a headache), basic statistics are really all we have.
These are a few of the reasons I revel in my work at ONErpm. Not only does the company provide its artists with deals that are reasonable and forward-thinking, but we’re also able to provide artists outside the major label system with better data and better insights. My team at ONErpm is developing tools to help our marketing and A&R teams close the data gap and better inform artists of all sizes.
(This post is brought to you with great help from Anne McGinnis-Townsend, an excellent colleague and oftentimes editor, who has never once bullied me for not knowing how to properly use a colon)
