Spotify is failing music artists with subpar analytics

Without access to good data, artists can’t understand their audiences and make the right decisions to grow their careers. Why are the standards so low in the music industry, and who benefits?

As part of my work with Delfina, I regularly conduct audience audits for organizations and brands. This means taking a deep dive at analytics across platforms to draw insights about audience behaviour, and suggest ways to increase customer/fan engagement via content.

I recently created the brand strategy for an independent, award-winning music artist’s upcoming project, and had to conduct an audience audit of their fan base. This was the first time I had the opportunity to look at Spotify data from an artists’ side, and what I saw wasn’t pretty.

I was stunned by the lack of data that was made available to artists. The following examples are filled with jargon, so bear with me:

• Spotify analytics offers no way to disaggregate data by age, location or gender, especially when looking at each song individually. This is a problem, because songs appear to perform differently across markets and audience segments. The data that’s made available deals with an artist’s audience taken as a whole, which makes it very hard to understand why songs perform differently, how to predict future behaviours, and how to market individual songs…