Measuring Success With Analytics | Wendy Day

Hi guys, Wendy Day here. Welcome back. So today we're going to talk about, um, the measurements that we use to measure success in the music business, some of which I like, some of which I don't like. I'm not going to talk about it right now. Okay, so, um, for radio, we measure the amounts of spins that an artist gets, um, with BDS, Broadcast Data Systems, and Mediabase. They measure the amount of spins that you get with, um, tertiary radio, meaning FM, like FM radio. So when you finish making a song and it's been mixed and mastered and it's a song that you feel will get some radio play, you submit that song to BDS or Mediabase. And you can do it one of two ways. You can either email it to them, to their— they offer email addresses on their website Or you can download some metadata and put it into your song so that they can pick it up. When you mail it into them, it's called encoding. It's like a fingerprint, if you will. That's the way that I do it, so I'm a little bit more familiar with this method than trying to add something into the metadata on my song or add something into the song itself. I always submit it to encoding, and then once it's encoded, as long as the song plays for at least a minute and a half at radio, and as long as they don't speed it up or slow it down, the fingerprint of the song will pick up at BDS and Mediabase. And then I can sit at my desk and I can pull up a report through BDS or Mediabase, and it will tell me where the record played, what time of day it played, meaning what station, you know, what city the station's in, and how many times it's spun at that station. It will also tell me the approximate audience. So if a song spins during morning drive time or afternoon drive time, it's going to have far more listeners than if it spins at 4 o'clock in the morning. And that will be illuminated on their, on their report that I'm able to pick up. It'll, it'll tell me what the approximate audience size was, you know, half a million, 200,000, 2 million, depending on where it spun. There's also Digital Radio Tracker, which is a relatively new service. I'm actually really excited about Digital Radio Tracker. It tracks internet play, internet spins, internet radio spins. And up until about 5 years ago, we couldn't track internet radio. And now that we can, I'm kind of excited because one of the reasons that I wasn't pursuing internet radio was because I didn't know how many people were listening to something when it played. I couldn't track it. I didn't know if when a DJ online was telling me that he was playing my song, I didn't know if he really was or not, or she really was or not. So the great thing about Digital Radio Tracker is that it tracks song plays at internet radio. Digital Radio Tracker also tracks some international radio. The great thing is it tracks BBC. I don't know of any other resource that tracks the BBC in London. But anyway, it tracks a lot of international radio, some traditional radio, some FM radio, but it's really built for internet radio. That was the purpose of it. But what's really great is I can go in and I can pull up like Trouble's song "Ready." I can go in to to my account. I can buy just one report. I don't have to subscribe to the entire service. I can just buy Trouble's Ready, and I can see a listing of all of the internet radio stations that played his record, when they played it, if there's other versions of it, like there's a remix, it will differentiate the remix and tell me where and when it played, and then it will also give me total audience. So I can get a feel for how many people have heard it. It also tracks internationally, so I can tell if it's playing in Germany or South Africa or Japan or Europe or wherever. And that's just a really great resource for me. I also use it for similar artists, like if I'm trying to work an artist who sounds a lot like a J. Cole or a Big K.R.I.T.T. or a Kendrick Lamar, I can go in and pull reports for their songs and find out what cities they were biggest in, where they received internet radio play, and then I can go and target those stations because I know they're gonna play my song because my song sounds similar to their songs. It does a lot of the work for me. And again, it's affordable. I think it's something like, you know, $30 or $40 per report. And I love that because it's something that's affordable to all artists. You can pull a report. You can also go to digitalradiotracker.com. You can sign up for a free account on the site. There's also a place in there where you can search for whatever artist you're looking for, either yourself or your artist or an artist who's similar in sound, and it will tell you whether or not there's any information about that artist or that song so that you can see that there's something worth pulling. And again, if you pull a report and it doesn't have any information, you get a credit for another report. So if it pulls absolutely nothing, you're not losing money. That doesn't happen with BDSM Media Base because you're subscribing to it. You could pull a bunch of artists and songs that have no spins at all and it doesn't matter, you're still paying for that subscription. Another way that we have to measure music is for sales, and this is for digital downloads and for actual CD sales. It's SoundScan, and it's picked up by the barcode on the music. When somebody purchases a CD at a store, when they pay for it, they scan the barcode, and at the end of the week, that report, that information is sent back to SoundScan to their headquarters, and then it's tallied up. And every Monday, SoundScan comes out for the week prior, and it lets you know exactly what was sold. Um, again, it's a week delay, it's the week prior, but it gives you an idea of who sold what. And that directly affects the Billboard charts. They're based on that. The thing that I don't like about— and I don't really go by SoundScan or Billboard charts anymore. And the reason that I don't follow them really is because they have invented this unit of measurement called streaming equivalent albums, SEAs. And what that is is for every 1,500 streams, they count it as one unit of play, one streaming equivalent, um, album. So here's where it gets a little weird, and you may have read about this, you know, recently in the press because this kind of came to light. Um, there's an album called Starboy by The Weeknd, and it's doing really well at streaming, but but it's not selling a lot of downloaded units. And then there's an album by a British pop duo, I think they're called the XXs, and they're selling a lot of units, but they're not streaming as much as The Weeknd. And in the old music business model, which is based on sales and not streaming, the XXs would be at number 1, but because of this thing called the streaming equivalent album, um, Starboy was the number one album. It beat out the XXs because it was streaming so many copies. And I don't have a problem necessarily with streaming. I love streaming. That's how I receive my music. I'm really looking forward to the music business going entirely to streaming. It just makes it a lot easier for artists to get noticed. But my problem is sort of this arbitrary number that they came up with where 1,500 streams equals 1 streaming equivalent album. I'm not sure where that number was invented. When I search Billboard's website trying to get information, there's a formula on there, but they don't really explain you know, where that unit of measurement came from or how they came up with it. It just kind of is. So it is a way to unify all of the music in terms of measurement, but it just, it doesn't seem as fair to me when you're measuring apples and oranges, when you're measuring streaming music and when you're measuring digital downloads. Because who's to say that one album that somebody purchases, they're only going to listen to 1,500 times? It doesn't make sense. And if there's 10 songs on that album, then technically it's 150 listens to the album that equals, you know, 1 digital download. Or I just, I don't understand that, that system of, of numbers. And then there's a couple of other companies that are relatively new to big data, but they're doing their thing. There's a company called BuzzAngle, which I like a lot. I subscribe to BuzzAngle. BuzzAngle measures all aspects of a song. It's not 100% accurate for rap. There's a lot of crossover. Like when I go in and I pull up like Trouble or YFN Lucci to see what, what the— what's going on with, you know, his sales and his spins at radio, sometimes they mix in other albums and music. When I send it in and, you know, say, hey, I noticed this, you know, there's an album in— that's listed in Trouble's, um, under Trouble's name that's not his release. They fix it right away, but because it's relatively new, there's quite a few of those things that have to be tolerated or worked out or whatever. But I like BuzzAngle a lot. It gives me an idea of what the social media is looking like for the artist. What the streaming is, what the sales. It kind of takes everything into consideration so that you get a really good picture of what's happening with the artist's career, and I like that. It also breaks it down per song. There's another company called The Next Big Sound. They also factor in Pandora to their results, which is kind of cool because Pandora, you know, streams a lot of music. It's not on demand like Spotify or Apple Music, so it doesn't pay the same way. You go through SoundExchange to get paid on Pandora, but I noticed that with Trouble, he gets millions and millions of streams at Pandora, so it's an excellent resource for us. The thing I don't like about Pandora is that when you send them the music, it takes them forever to add it into their catalog. Trouble has put out 8 albums over the past, you know, 5 or 6 years, 4 with me working with him and 4 with somebody else working with him. And of those 8 albums, only, I think only 4 or 5 are up on Pandora. And it's like a mixture of, you know, what I worked with and what he did prior to me being on board. But it's just weird that there's no rhyme or reason to which albums made it up. And I know Tony has really worked hard to get all 8 of them into Pandora to the point where, you know, he's tried being nice, he's tried calling the guy's boss, he's tried, you know, harassing the guy, he's tried backing off. It's like he's tried everything possible and the system just needs to be, um, it needs to be fixed right now. Hopefully in a year or so they'll have that worked out, or maybe 6 months from now they'll have it worked out. But it's been a problem for a long time. And then the last company that I'm familiar with is called SoundCharts. I don't use SoundCharts. They're a little pricey for me. You subscribe to them per month, just like you do with BuzzAngle or Next Big Sound. But I just find them a little costly for what they offer. I think they're great at what they do. I really like the big data that they offer. The analytics are spectacular. It's just a little bit pricey for artists. You know, I work with artists that, you know, have budgets, but they don't have, you know, independently wealthy budgets, and SoundCharts is just priced a little bit high. It's more like a major label price the way BDS and Mediabase are. They're just kind of priced out of our marketplace, but they do a great job. And, you know, I like, I like what they, I like what they offer. If their price was lower, I would absolutely subscribe to them. I think they're, they're wonderful. So, um, that are just— that's some of the different, um, measuring techniques that we use to measure success in the music industry. You can always reach out to these companies individually and find out what it costs to buy individual reports if you're trying to find out what is happening with your project. Um, again, I like analytics because I go in and see what the competition's doing. I go in and see what similar-sounding artists are doing, what their biggest markets are. It's really helpful when you're planning a tour, whether it's a promotional tour or a paid tour. It's very helpful to know where the hotspots are for your artist, you know, and ditto for international tours because it shows you what their largest overseas markets are. So back in the day in the music industry, we just kind of had to wing it. We didn't really have much data, you know. SoundScan has only been around since the '90s. And BDS and Mediabase have, I guess, have been around as long, but I just really like the analytics that we're able to get through the digital world. You know, they're very hard to manipulate. It's very hard to bullshit in terms of streaming and digital, and I like that. You know, back in the day, a lot of artists scammed SoundScan even though they swore up and down that you couldn't, people did. So I'm just really thankful that we have a way to measure success that's a little bit more believable and a little bit more legitimate. So there you have it, guys. That's how we measure success in the music business. That's some of the analytics and big data that we use. If you have a Spotify account or an Apple Music account, make sure that you go in and set up your own playlists. With Apple Music, you set up an entire profile so that it's sort of like social media where you can post your videos, you know, your, your YouTube videos. When somebody views it, it counts as a view. When somebody listens to your song sample on Apple Music, it counts as a stream, which is very exciting because you get paid for every stream. And you can go to my blog, industryreport.com. I've written a couple of articles about streaming and how artists get paid for their streaming. You might wanna go in and take a look and see what those rates are. I know a lot of artists that are signed to major labels aren't happy with the rates that they're getting paid at streaming services, and I don't blame them. You know, they've got really messed up deals with their labels, and a lot of artists get between 12% and 18% of whatever is selling or streaming, And if Spotify is paying you $0.0003 per stream and you're only getting 12% of that, it's just, it's not enough money. So I totally get it when I hear artists like Taylor Swift complaining about how streaming isn't paying enough money. But the bottom line is, if you've got your own, um, your own label and your own career and the streaming money is coming to you you know, 80% of it if you've got a distribution deal, or 100% if you're collecting all of the money yourself. That's, that's good money. You know, my clients make great money streaming, so I'm not mad. Okay, y'all, thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you soon. Bye!