Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash

Musicians, here’s how to use your data

The concept of “data” is often an abstract one for artists and musicians (and even labels). You know that you have data in the form of email addresses and perhaps access to insights from social media and your website. However, the applications of this data are not clear.

There are the obvious uses that get talked about a lot in DIY music industry circles (e.g. “We’re getting a lot of Spotify streams from Cleveland, OH. Let’s book a show there!”). This is a valid interpretation and action based on available data. That said, it is only the tip of the iceberg for how artists can take advantage of their data.

Where your data comes from

Before we talk about use cases, let’s identify the data sources that are available to artists. I classify data into three buckets: Owned Data, Accessible Data, and Insights

Type 1: Owned Data

Owned Data is data that is given to you by your audience. The largest data group that falls into this bucket would be your email list. When you get fans’ email information, you may also be requesting location information, age, and listening preferences (streaming, vinyl, downloads, etc.).

If you have an ecommerce store on your website (and you should), you’ll also have emails, location info, and purchase habits for fans that order your merch.

Owned Data sources include:

• Email list
• Ecommerce sales (including sales through platforms such as PledgeMusic, Shopify, and Kickstarter)
• Information collected from surveys and giveaways

Type 2: Accessible Data

Accessible Data is data that you don’t own, but you can use it for marketing purposes. An example of this is Facebook data. Facebook knows a significant amount of information about individuals (for better or worse). As a “business” on Facebook, we can’t access this information on an individual level, but we can take advantage of it for marketing.

For example, let’s say an artist is doing a vinyl pressing of their new album. They can target their fans and narrow that audience based on fans that have displayed an interest in vinyl, according to Facebook’s data.

Facebook will also allow you to create custom audiences based on engagement with your page, content, and Facebook pixel activity. Again, you don’t know who these individuals are, but you know that they fit the parameters that you set.

Accessible Data sources include:

• Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube user data
• Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics data (Don’t know what this is? It’s important. Read this article on Facebook Pixel basics.)
• Data from partner companies and brands

Type 3: Insights

Insights are reports that provide information on your audience and their activity but do not provide opportunities to utilize that information on the platform.

Spotify tells artists how many listens they get, geographic and age information for those listens, and how people are discovering an artist’s music (playlists, searches). However, aside from a few customizable areas of your artist profile, you can’t communicate with those listeners.*

Insights sources include:

• Spotify artist dashboards
• Top-level insights from social media platforms
• Sales numbers from shows (assuming the promoter doesn’t share customer data — in which case it could become Owned Data)
• SmartURL or other link tracking data (unless you’re embedding a Facebook or Google Analytics pixel — in which case it would become Accessible Data)

* Spotify has launched a beta version of its ad platform. For a minimum of $250, you can serve ads to your listeners (as long as they’re using the freemium version). This raises the utility of Spotify data, but I’ve still opted to classify Spotify data as “Insights.”

Spotify Artist Insights

How can you use this data?

Depending on your situation, there are dozens of opportunities to utilize this data. Let’s get some of the obvious ones out the way so that we can get into the lesser known (and most powerful) use cases.

Geographic information (available from nearly all sources) — Where are you popular? Play a show there. What locations are growing faster that others in terms of streams and ticket sales? Put some extra effort in those markets.

Age information (available from nearly all sources) — Who do you appeal to? Make sure your content output is relevant to that age group. Match age data and location data to reveal potential branding partnerships.

Purchase history (ecommerce platforms) — Did someone purchase your last album on vinyl? You should send those people an email that your new album is available on vinyl. Are there some high rollers on your list that buy vinyl, a t-shirt, and a poster? Create some premium merch items and send an email to that group first, saying they have “exclusive first access to these limited edition items” thanks to their loyalty to the band.

Now, let’s look at some more sophisticated uses of the same data.

Audience Growth via Facebook Videos — Assuming your audience is not too young for Facebook (this tactic also works on Instagram), post a video on your page that has wide appeal. This could be a cover or anything that eases the barrier of listening to an unknown band. Use that post to create an ad targeting people likely to watch that video (if this is a cover, target fans of that artist and similar artists). Once you’ve hit a few thousand views, create a second ad. This ad will be targeting people that watched at least 30 seconds or 50% of your original video. With this video, share an original song or something that will “hook” these new viewers. You now have an extremely warm audience of people that are familiar with your music and can easily be converted to fans with the right call to action (a show in their area, new single/video, etc.).

Retargeting People Who Abandon their Shopping Cart — For every person that makes a purchase on your website, there are two to three people who added and item to their cart but did not check out. These people would be the low-hanging fruit for you to market to. All they need is one carefully crafted push for you to convince them to purchase that item. Follow through with great service, and they’ll be glad they did!

Retargeting People Who Click Your Links — It’s easy for people to like your posts on social media. And while, as artists, we’re grateful for the engagement and attention, this shallow engagement doesn’t show proof of fandom. However, the people that click the links that you post and travel off of social media are people that care what you have to say. Next time, instead of just posting the link to whatever you are sharing, create a link with an embedded Facebook pixel using a service such as Bitly or RocketLink. Check out Fender using Bitly links in the screenshot below.

Measuring the effectiveness of an ad/landing page — When you are running a social media ad campaign, it is important to be able to identify the “weak link” in your funnel. A lack of sales is not enough of an indicator to tell you what portion of your ad funnel needs improvement. So rather than say “Why is no one buying my album, merch, etc.?”, ask yourself if there is a lack of traffic or a lack of conversions. If there is a lack of traffic, that means a lack of interest or your ads are not engaging. If there is ample traffic, but a lack of conversions, then there is interest in your product, but your product is priced too high or your landing page is not optimized.

You don’t always have full insight into the total amount of traffic that is going to your store page. Let’s say you’re releasing a new album and are sending people to an ecommerce site that you don’t own (such as Amazon). You don’t know how many views your Amazon page is getting, but you do know how much traffic you are sending there via social media, email, and tracking links. You also know how many sales you are generating on that platform.

Come up with your own use cases. What are your business goals? More fans, more email sign ups, more sales? Figure out what behavior online and on social media is meaningful to those goals, and use the tools listed above to leverage data in pursuit of those goals.

Final Thoughts

1. Why Facebook? I reference Facebook a lot in this article for a couple reasons. One, Facebook owns Instagram and between the two platforms, you can reach just about anyone on social media. Two, Facebook advertising and analytics tools are typically a gateway into social media advertising. So, I’m hoping that by showing you these basics, you’ll be able to take this knowledge to other platforms.
2. Other Platforms: Google (Youtube), Twitter, Reddit, and Snapchat all have ad platforms with varying amounts of features that you can use. If your audience is on those platforms, I absolutely recommend testing those out.
3. Beware faulty conclusions: Sometimes you can look at data and pull immediate, obvious conclusions. However, sometimes you go in looking for answers and arrive at faulty conclusions, even if the data appears to support your thesis. Correlation does not always imply causation.

Dan Servantes is a marketing consultant at GHStrategic. You can reach him on Twitter (@drservantes) and via this form.