What Data in the Music Industry Really Means : Interview with Patrick Gilchrist
I sat down with Patrick Gilchrist of the pop punk band Not My Weekend to talk about the ins and outs of data within the music industry. We talk through the major influences in music analytics and what this means for Not My Weekend’s avid listeners. Patrick introduces ideas based on the accuracy of Spotify analytics and draws comparisons to those given by Instagram. Looking into Not My Weekend’s data from Spotify is interpreted in multiple ways in order to track overall growth and keep fans engaged with the music. We wrapped up by discussing what the numbers hold for Not My Weekend moving forward.
Jordan:
Hi, this is Patrick Gilchrist. Patrick, would you like to introduce yourself?
Patrick:
Yes, thank you so much for having me. My name is Patrick Gilchrist I sing and manage a pop punk band called not my weekend and also, I spend a lot of my time on my own social media pages, posting videos and making content and I actually manage a few other people’s social media accounts for them as part of my day job. But today, I will just be talking about projects that I participate in creatively, which again, is my personal social media and my band, Not My Weekend.
Jordan:
First off, how do you think people find your music?
Patrick:
I think there’s two main ways that people find our music. First is through my personal social media, more likely than not, they’ll see a video I have made that is related to music, but not necessarily including my music. And then hopefully, if they enjoy that enough, take the time to explore through some of my other pages, which include my band, and then become what I would consider to be a more active listener and the second main way that I think a large majority of our streams have come from will be through Spotify algorithmic playlists so when our music has been released, especially our earlier releases around the 2018 period, we were releasing music, we dropped our music at a really good times and promoted them really well. And they ended up on Spotify as release radar for long periods of times. And the release radar is a really, really good playlist. And it automatically adds new music to listeners profiles that they think that they’ll like, based on the other songs they listened to, which is a great way of getting people to add music to their library, but not necessarily become an active listener of the band, or even really know who the band is, like, I mean, to say they’re not like a dedicated fan, but they are listening to the song all the time. And they do have it saved to their library. And maybe they even follow us on Spotify specifically. But I don’t see a lot of crossover from Spotify, algorithmic playlists to let’s say, our Instagram or, or YouTube or something like that. We’ve never gotten a Spotify editorial playlist. And I know lots of artists that really, you know, fight their way to get those. But then still, the vast majority of their streams come from, basically to Spotify, algorithmic playlists, those being released radar and Discover Weekly, and we still are on Discover Weekly with songs that are four years old, every single day.
Jordan:
So tell me about the average demographic of the people who listen to your music or consume your content.
Patrick:
I would say in large part, it’s, it’s mostly 18-to-25-year old’s, which is sort of tricky, because that’s not quite how Spotify breaks down their age categories. And it, uh, truthfully, when it comes to Spotify, specifically, I don’t think that they I can rely on their data for the ages of people listening to my music, because I think such a large portion of the people that are adults that are adding our songs to their library are not likely to come out to a show or even know who our band is. And in addition to that, so many people sign up for Spotify with their Facebook’s, and so many people lie about their age on Facebook. And I believe that it inflates a lot of the ages. Because in order to make a Facebook back in the day, you had to be a certain age at a time you had to be a college student, meaning you had to be 18 so like you were a junior high student or a high school student that wanted to be on Facebook, you would lie up in order to use the service. And then it’s stuck like that so there’s I mean to say that people on Spotify appear older than they are, or are using their households accounts or their parents accounts. I when I look at my statistics on my personal social media, it is pretty much entirely 13 to maybe 24- or 25-year-olds, and it’s pretty 50/50 between men and women in terms of gender, but I will say I receive more personal engagement, more comments, more messages and things like that from women in general and I think that’s just because the kind of shimmery brand of pop punk we make is so Disney Channel inspired and kind of girl rock inspired to begin with it. I ended up with a lot of those people engaging in our content, which I really prefer because men are the worst.
Jordan:
How does it differ from Spotify to Instagram?
Patrick:
Yeah, I was just touching on this in terms of the age range thing for sure, but I think the biggest difference is that like Spotify is just not like a social media platform in the same way. So, it’s not just tracking the people, it’s just tracking clicks, you know, it’s just tracking that someone has clicked follow, and that someone has saved a song and that someone has listened to a song, whereas on my Instagram I can see how many individual accounts, literally were able to see my face or visit my profile that week. And from that data, when I combine it with who’s actually following me and actually messaging me and leaving comments, I can infer, like how well I’m doing slash what types of videos are connecting the most with people that are more likely to take the time to go listen to my band, to become someone that wants to refer back to the things that I’m doing more often. And for that reason, I think Instagram and also TikTok statistics are a lot more helpful and a lot more informing to how I actually operate, including with the music and with the band and Spotify is a little bit more a little bit. Like I’m only really relying on the one number on Spotify and that is, I’m really only relying on two numbers on Spotify, probably follower count, and total streams count and on Instagram, I’m relying on pretty much everything they give me, so which is a lot, it’s a lot of numbers.
Jordan:
What are the top five cities that the band streams perform the best in?
Patrick:
Our top cities on Spotify are London at number one and then in order Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis and Seattle, I have a theory that the reason our top cities are London and Chicago is because most VPNs automatically connects to London and Chicago if you don’t change them, if you look at other artists on Spotify, there’s actually, you know, 1000s of people whose top cities are London and Chicago, when I think it’s way more likely that it would be to the United States or Los Angeles or New York or you know, wherever that individual artists is from, yeah, I don’t trust that number either, especially because I truly believe it definitely would be Denver, and Denver is in that number three spot. And then Minneapolis and Seattle. I suppose that makes sense. There’s probably a couple people there that just listened to us a lot. But yeah, it’s an interesting thing, because London and Chicago are technically our top listen to cities, but that’s just because VPN connects the most people to those locations.
Jordan:
Have you noticed any trends in your own music or in the music industry in general, over the past few years?
Patrick:
I think music, in our own music, we kind of took a hit over the pandemic and a little bit of back and forth with our label caused us to release our album at sort of an inconvenient time that we were a little bit uncomfortable with and we dropped it all at once, which we wouldn’t have done in a pre-pandemic world and because of that, I think our streams suffered a little bit. In music in general, I think that music had a really huge moment in 2019 and 2020 when Tik Tok was kind of first getting its start. Tik Tok wanted to view itself as a music app and as a dancing app and for that reason, it blew up a lot of music artists really, really quickly and now I think those artists that blew up in that time period now in 2023, are kind of established artists that are continuing to ride that wave. Whereas there’s not as many new artists blowing up now. Because TikTok is taking the time to promote more spoken videos and more commentary, style videos and vlog style videos because I feel that they feel they have already conquered music and dancing and to their credit, I think that they probably have. And record labels, you know, consistently pay them to promote songs, when you know, someone like a major artist, someone like Taylor Swift, or someone like that has a new song out and that’s all they need. So, they can spend the rest of their time, you know, reeling in new types of audiences, audiences that are interested in comedy and television and broader entertainment and, you know, adults that don’t care about the newest and best song because it’s, you know, it’s true, the vast majority of the population on the planet is people in their 20s and 30s. So, you know, now that they’ve got all the new music that the kids are listening to in the palm of their hands, they just want to expand and for that reason, less new artists are blowing up on TikTok than it was a couple years ago, but I’m sure the pendulum is gonna swing again and there’s gonna be some new thing that blows up a bunch of tiny artists at once but I’m not sure what that’s going to be and I’m not sure if it’s going to be through short form video like it was a couple of years ago.
Jordan:
How do you keep track of your bands grow?
Patrick:
For me the biggest metric of our bands growth is if people are coming to shows, you know if people are there to see us they’re buying tickets to see us. That is the biggest, biggest and most important metric for me, that is the people that are most likely to buy merch that are actually going to allow us to continue to be a band financially speaking and then I think the number that informs me the most whether or not people are going to come to a show is really just our follower count, mostly on Instagram, Facebook, a little bit on TikTok, and then right after that follower account is engagement numbers. So, if we’re consistently getting large amounts of likes on our newer posts, if we’re consistently getting large amounts of shares on our newer posts, that means that we’re more likely to have an easy time selling tickets to the next live show, regardless of what that follower account may be, but it just needs to the numbers need to continue to rise is the main point and I don’t really look at our streaming numbers for at our monthly listener count on Spotify, because I have played shows with fans and I have seen artists that have huge, huge, huge monthly listener numbers, and they just do not translate to a live audience and we need a live audience in order to continue being a band financially speaking.
Jordan:
do you think that statistics from social media or Spotify are a more accurate representation of your fan base?
Patrick:
I think the statistics from social media are a more accurate representation of my fan base. I think that they are gathering more data. I think they care more about engagement, and I think engagement translates directly to people that are likely to come see me in person and I think that people that that are likely to come see me in person are significantly more likely to spend any amount of money on the things I do in terms of merch and tickets to see us. So yeah, 100% social media for sure.
Jordan:
Any closing remarks?
Patrick:
Thank you for having me. I love talking about numbers I love talking about stats is one of my favorite parts about creating is getting to talk about the numbers associated with the things I create. It’s kind of a weird thing. I think that social media statistics are kind of a bizarre combination of left and right brain thinking working in harmony and that that keeps me up and keeps me going. So yeah, it’s good stuff.
