Are New Analytics Coming To Beats Music?

Musicmetric sample

Apple recently acquired a British analytics service company called Semetric, according to The Guardian, making many wonder whether improved analytics will be part of the new Beats Music when it relaunches later this year. Although an exact sales price was not revealed, it's estimated by the Financial Times to be around $50 million.

The interesting part of the deal is that Semetric owns the music analytic service called Musicmetric, which specializes in tracking sales, pirated downloads and artist social media for labels and independent clients (see a sample on the left). The company recently struck a deal with Spotify to include its dashboard on the service, although another analytics company, Next Big Sound, provides the data.

While virtually all streaming music services provide some sort of analytics, the presumption is that Musicmetric brings greater depth than what's normally available, which could be a factor in making Beats Music more attractive to some labels and artists.

Apple has also been attempting to renegotiate its current licensing deals with the major labels in order to bring the monthly subscription fee down to around $5, which could be the killer feature for consumers. This is no sure thing, however, as the labels have been very reluctant to do so.

Whatever the case, Beats Music is set to cause some disruption in the streaming music side of the business. Both Spotify and Pandora should be very concerned, as they don't have nearly the deep pockets to match an all-out effort by Apple to gain market share.

Predicting a Country Music Hit

What would you do if you knew the formula for a hit? Would you follow it to the letter to take advantage, or would you do exactly the opposite to stay true to yourself? These are interesting personal questions that luckily we never have to ask ourselves because you can't predict a hit. Or can you?

Musicmetric recently released an interesting whitepaper called "Cracking The Code - Predicting a Country Music Hit" that can look at the sales and social metrics of a country song and reasonably predict if it will be a hit or not within four weeks of debuting on the charts. The research looked at 28 different metrics, including airplay, Shazam tags, Facebook likes, Soundcloud followers, online activity, chart positions, category, sales and other audience metrics. Of the 66 country music tracks that they looked at, 23 went to #1.

They found that the average #1 country single had:

• 3.5 times their usual weekly Facebook likes 
• 2.0 times their usual weekly YouTube plays 
• 1.8 times their usual weekly Twitter Followers 
• 2.0 times their usual weekly BitTorrent downloads 
• took 16.5 weeks from its first entry to its chart peak 

After looking at their model, the researchers found that they could predict with a 79% probability if a song would reach the top 20, 63% if it would the top 10, and 50% if it would go to #1.

While this isn't that helpful for songwriters, it sure is for record labels and publishers. That said, I don't think I'd want my promotional budget hanging on research that has even that much room for error, but it's still the closest we've come to hit prediction yet.

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Who Were The Most Pirated Artists In 2013?

Piracy is way down since the mid-2000's but it does still happen. Here's a list of the most pirated artists on BitTorrent in 2013, according to MusicMetric.com. I think you'll find few surprises in terms of the most popular artists.

rank	artists	est. downloads
musicmetric.com
1	Bruno Mars	5,783,556
2	Rihanna	5,414,166
3	Daft Punk	4,212,361
4	Justin Timberlake	3,930,185
5	Flo Rida	3,470,825
6	Kanye West	3,199,969
7	Eminem	3,176,122
8	Jay Z	3,171,358
9	Drake	3,139,408
10	Pitbull	3,138,308
11	One Direction	2,920,445
12	Maroon 5	2,857,652
13	Zed	2,828,764
14	Nicki Minaj	2,681,177
15	Adele	2,594,275
16	Avicii	2,562,151
17	David Guetta	2,441,235
18	Linkin Park	2,352,385
19	Pharrell Williams	2,336,996
20	Katy Perry	2,318,740

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

The 9 Top Music Pirate Countries

We hear less about it these days because online music streaming has become the hot button issue, but there's still a good bit of music piracy that goes on all over the world. Musicmetric has compiled a report called The Digital Music Index that found that there were over 400 million illegal downloads after watching Bittorrent for the first 6 months of the year. They broke it down by country, and here's what they found.

1. US - 96.68 million.
Most downloaded artist: Drake

2. UK - 43.26 million.
Most downloaded artist: Ed Sheeran

3. Italy - 33.15 million.
Most downloaded artist: Laura Pausini

4. Canada - 23.95 million.
Most downloaded artist: Kenye West

5. Brazil - 19.72 million.
Most downloaded artist: Billy Van

6. Australia - 19.23 million.
Most downloaded artist: Hilltop Hoods

7. Spain - 10.3 million.
Most downloaded artist: Pablo Alberan

8. India - 8.96 million.
Most downloaded artist: Billy Van

9. France - 8.39 million.
Most downloaded artist: Sexion d'Assaut

I'm actually surprised at how low these numbers are. If you listen to the RIAA, they should be about 20 times higher, but here we have empirical data that shows that while pirating still continues it's not to the level that the music industry tells us.

Still, if you're a record label, it must be distressing that 400 million potential sales were left on the table. That said, how many of those would've been turned into a sale if piracy were eliminated? My guess is that it wouldn't have been even half of that total, and spread out world-wide, the potential revenue is a drop in the bucket compared to what major record labels deal with every day. If anything, this study shows that streaming music is beginning to take hold and piracy is decreasing.

It will be interesting to visit this again next year. I bet the numbers will be a lot lower.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.