One of the huge upsides in the digital distribution economy is access to data. Content creators have more tools for tracking their content than ever before. In fact, not that long ago you just kind of had to "guess" what was going on with your music. Now, with at least two major platforms, you can watch it happening in real time. The downside, of course, is that there isn't a ton of uniformity. Each service has its own little quirks and you kind of need to come up with the metrics that matter most to you. Let's take a look at some of the defining characteristics of the different "content analytics" platforms related to services like Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Pandora, and YouTube.
All of these platforms help you look at the big picture. That means things like number of streams over time, number of listeners etc. Typically, the most common time frames include looking at these changes over 7 days, 28 days, the year so far, or for as long as they've been tracking the data. But they all have a unique way of measuring how fans engage with your content. And they all have some extra tidbits worth paying attention to. Probably the current "standard" for these platforms is Spotify for Artists which underwent a huge overhaul beginning in 2018 and continues to release new updates with regularity. Most semi-serious artists probably at least know about Spotify for Artists.
Spotify was the first platform to really "brand" its metrics. The most obvious example of course, is "monthly listeners" — an otherwise arbitrary statistic that Spotify has chosen to make front-and-center on its platform and was the metric that launched a thousand marketing plans. But the most important metric available to users is actually "saves," a metric that is mostly unique to Spotify for Artists (but not Spotify as a consumer-facing platform). Saves are probably the best indicator of user engagement with a song. A good "saves to listeners" ratio helps you make sure your song is resonating with the right people. Although not entirely unique to Spotify, you can also track your "followers" in Spotify for Artists. The unfortunate thing about followers is we don't know what they're "worth" at this point. Obviously if somebody follows you on Spotify, they're more likely to hear your music than if they don't. But how much more? Spotify doesn't really say....
Your followers aren't necessarily guaranteed to see your new music — a point emphasized by Spotify's recent push to get people to advertise new releases to Spotify in platform. There is also "Canvas Views" for people who upload a Canvas for their song. It is, frankly, not that interesting of a metric. Spotify also has a few articles available to read. They are definitely intended for brand new acts. Spotify of course hasn't released any official language on this, but general knowledge says that if at least 10% to 20% of the people who listen to your song also save it, you'll be in a great spot algorithmically. Spotify for Artists is how you officially submit a song for editorial consideration. That doesn't mean you might not end up on an editorial list if you don't submit the song. And it certainly doesn't mean you will end up on a list just for submitting your song. But "best practices" for Spotify include submitting your song through their submission portal on Spotify for Artists. You technically need to do it a least a week in advance, but a month or longer if you've got it is typically preferred.
Definitely. Spotify for Artist does a good job of letting you control your profile presence on the platform. Spotify is pretty clearly working to make Spotify for Artists a "two-sided marketplace", that means they ultimately want to monetize the platform by offering services within it. They've already started doing this by acquiring SoundBetter, a platform designed to help artists find collaborators, singers, producers, mix engineers, mastering services, and more. Spotify has advertised SoundBetter within Spotify for Artists.
Apple Music lagged behind Spotify in releasing an analytics platform for awhile, but when it finally got out of beta, the Apple Music for Artists platform offered some interesting metrics. It's much more of a straight up analytics platform, meaning there aren't any editorial submissions or extra content. In some ways, that keeps it nice and clean. But in others, it means there's not a whole lot of reason to hang around for more than a few minutes. Apple Music for Artists has two distinctly unique metrics worth paying attention to. The first one is downloads. This is important because people still buy digital downloads (especially internationally) and it's money in the bank. That's an insight you wouldn't be able to get from any platform besides Apple Music for Artists. The second unique metric is the Shazams app that helped you identify what song was playing. Well Apple bought it awhile back and incorporated it into things like Siri. And believe it or not, people still use it quite a bit. Shazams are a metric that can indicate interest in your song. The more a tune is "Shazamed," the more it means people are interested in listening to it again.
While it's possible for a user to favorite a song on Apple Music, we don't have a way of seeing those numbers right now in the analytics platform. Maybe in the future, but it just doesn't exist. However, Apple music does prominently display radio spins, which can be another good indicator of your song getting long-term algorithmic support. Here's another interesting thing about Apple Music: instead of displaying a monthly listener stat, they go with Average Daily Listeners. Apple Music's geographic location is also a lot more robust. While Spotify only lets you look at top cities, Apple Music for Artists shows you legitimately every place your music was played on a heat map. It's probably the best geographic information of all the platforms, along with Pandora (which is only in the U.S.).
Apple Music typically pays better than Spotify because they don't offer a free version. While the platform has fewer users than Spotify and you might get fewer listeners there, the money is better. In other words: don't sleep on Apple Music. Millions of people still use it and the Apple Music for Artists platform is robust enough for you to measure potential marketing effects of sending people to Apple Music. Apple Music is probably the slowest when it comes to updating data. It's pretty much always two days behind (sometimes three) and can update at completely random times of the day. The platform also doesn't have any "real time" measurements, which overall means it all just lags a little behind the others.
Amazon Music for Artists' streams and listeners do update in real time, making it the most up-to-date platform of the three so far. Hands down the most unique metric (and also potentially the most confusing of all the platforms) is "Voice" and "Daily Voice Index." What it boils down to is: how many people asked Alexa to play your music. Amazon breaks these down by voice requests for Artist, Album, Song, and Lyrics which is definitely unique. So basically, this is how Amazon is measuring a user's engagement with your music. Similar to Apple's Shazams feature, it seems like it could limit a lot of actual engagement and might be better for determining certain trends with songs.
It's also clearly in line with their goal of making Alexa a huge priority. The Daily Voice Index basically shows you if the number of requests indicates you are "Cool," "Warm," "Hot," or "On Fire." Outside of the obvious implications, we don't really know what that means. Amazon's official explanation for this is that "Daily Voice Index compares this artist’s total number of requestors with artists that have a similar-sized audience on Amazon Music." Amazon Music for Artists also has one other section that is unique to it: Fans. Again, not a lot of information about what exactly constitutes a fan or a "Superfan" (a subcategory within fans), but Amazon says, "Fans are a segment of an artist’s listeners from the trailing year who show a high affinity for their music."
Which makes it sound like they're using how likely somebody is to listen to the artist over time as an engagement factor, which is pretty cool. Because it's all still in beta we don't have a ton of info on how useful any of this is just yet. But it's nice to see Amazon working towards offering unique insights based on its platform. Amazon is very interested in becoming a one-stop-shop for artists. That includes things like offering artist merch directly in Amazon itself. They are currently testing the waters and sending fairly frequent surveys to beta users about potential features to include. So that is to say, the one thing to know about the early iteration of Amazon Music for Artists is: expect it to change, probably drastically.
YouTube uses "YouTube Analytics for Artists" interchangeably with YouTube Studio, but we'll just keep calling it YouTube Studio for now because, well, that's what it's called in YouTube. First of all, props to YouTube for being the only platform that includes its analytics dashboard directly in its core product. But that's also because YouTube is the only one of these platforms where you can directly upload your content without a middleman. Technically, YouTube's various iterations of analytics are the OG. They date all the way back to 2008 in some form or fashion. YouTube Studio's data puts all the others to shame. But that also means it can be a bit overwhelming. So when it comes to looking at YouTube Studio like you would the other three mentioned above, what are some of the important stats?
YouTube Studio has so many metrics that are unique to it that we could write a whole post just on YouTube and barely scratch the surface. Most people already know about likes, comments, and subs though. Instead, let's look at a particularly interesting metric: Watch time which is a pretty solid indicator of engagement because it allows you to see just how much of a song a user is listening to. We know Spotify has this data (which they refer to "skip rate") but they don't share it on their platform. That means your ability to get in and see how long people are watching videos for can really help you understand which songs might be resonating the most. Another critically important unique metric: MONEY. If you're monetizing your channel, YouTube Studio can show you your estimated earnings from the ads playing on your videos up to a few days ago. These two unique metrics alone make YouTube Studio very powerful.
YouTube has a very cool feature that allows you to see how your songs are doing in videos where you have a copyright claim. What does this mean? It means if somebody uploading their own lyric video of your song, you get to track those views and engagement in your YouTube Studio, even though it's not technically your video. Another cool thing is that you can see your views in real time, meaning if you're running ads (either on YouTube or elsewhere), you can monitor their effectiveness. If you're using Google Ads to run YouTube ads, it will even break down that traffic source for you. Oh, and traffic source — another great metric. Really this whole platform is just head and shoulders the best one for analytics nerds. Except for general age and location data, which is surprisingly not great. That's probably due to the fact that YouTube doesn't require you to have an account or enter any of that data to watch a video. The monetization for YouTube is not like the other platforms, so it's much harder to pin down. And because you can upload a lot of content that isn't just strictly your music, it's up to you to be organized enough to make use of the data.
There are several other platforms that might be working on analytics backends we don't know about yet. Places like Deezer and TIDAL seem to be good candidates for them, for sure.
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