Yesterday I was a participant on a panel at Midem called, "Why Knowing your Fans Matters." We had a great conversation, and below are brief notes from some of the comments I made, albeit the ones I can remember:

• at least 3 technology advancements have created an environment that has significantly changed the music industry
  
  • ubiquitous access (high speed, mobile, WiFi, etc)
  • widespread social network adoption
  • decreased cost and increased speed to develop web apps
• there is a significant amount of data being produced every day by both artists, labels and music listeners
• at present, there are at least two types of data that can be collected relative to artists: quantitative and qualitative
• examples of quantitative data include numbers of plays, downloads, fans, etc.
• qualitative data is information that is pulled from what is being said about artists (e.g. blogs, reviews, comments in social networks, etc.)
• Understanding this data is important to an artist as it provides insights about trends and opinions relative to your music, and it's the service Band Metrics will provide
• data is only as good as the analysis that's performed relative to the needs of artists
• there are multiple challenges to collecting and analyzing data about musicians and bands including:
  • retrieval from disparate music services
  • storage, indexing and searching music related information
  • prediction analysis, AI and understanding behavioral patters surrounding music and artists
• getting to the question of why an artist and/or song is popular, while difficult is exciting
• the wisdom of crowds is not always the correct analysis as demonstrated in the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis
• Another book I mentioned was The Numerati by Stephen Baker

As soon as I receive the video of the panel, I will post it here on Indie Music Tech. Many thanks to Bruce, Neil and Cory for allowing me to share the stage with them.

UPDATE: Here's a summary of the discussion.