The Changing Demographics of Social Media

Flowtown created this nice infographic yesterday illustrating how the average age for social media users is increasing. For example, the average Facebook user is now 38 years old, and 64% of all Twitter users are now over the age of 35. Does this shift change social media strategies for artists, labels and online music services? Probably, but it would be useful to know what sociological factors are driving the increase, how are these age groups using social media, which countries and cities represent the greatest increases, etc.

Influence your Local Music Scene with Gigwish

Gigwish is a webapp that enables music enthusiasts to help influence their local music scene by voting for artists to play in their area, and then sharing their votes with their friends to encourage additional voting. The goal for music fans is to generate enough votes to influence promoters, booking agencies and venues to hire the acts they want to see (might be useful for an artist's street team).

Free Concert Discovery App

Updated:
Flyer is a free concert discovery app that searches your iTunes music library and provides an up-to-date listing of shows for those artists based on the geographical area you define (see video demo below).

Presently in beta, the initial version of Flyer is a desktop-based app that utilizes the Bandsintown API, and works with both Macs and PCs using iTunes. If you have any questions/comments, please contact Shane O'Donnell.

Music Industry Marketing and Millennials

Are you marketing your music, service or music technology to millennials? If yes, than you may want to study this infographic below, created by Flowtown last Friday.

Learn more about your music with Decibel

UPDATED:
Learning more about your favorite band (from the meaning of a song to the studio it was recorded in), will continue to be part of the music experience, and Decibel, a new music technology startup out of London aims to assist by providing in-depth metadata about songs and artists as you listen to, or purchase them. While it's not clear how they'll provide this service, Decibel seems similar to MusicBrainz, which has a significant database of music metadata that's readily accessible, and Robert Kaye has been working on it for about 10 years. However, Decibel seems to be aggregating information from a variety of metadata repositories, including MusicBrainz and AMG (see comments below from the CEO, Gregory Kris), attempting to become the "most sophisticated and comprehensive repository of factual music data ever built" by connecting every album, track and artist ever recorded.

How Does Social Influence Effect Music Discovery?

Yesterday Bob Lefsetz wrote about the challenges of getting people to pay attention to your music. While he's correct that music recommendation and discovery is difficult, partly due to the increased amount of music content (i.e. signal-to-noise), democratically filtering out which songs and artists are the rising ones based on quantifiable and qualifiable information will require technology. For example, The Hype Machine does this well by mining the blogosphere and Twitter. The question is, will a human element remain necessary to the process? If so, what does that look like? Who are the social gatekeepers? Does their influence on an artist's popularity help or hinder music discovery? How are the social gatekeepers determined?

Seemingly, it's too early to see how social influence will impact music discovery, but I'd like to hear what artists, managers, labels and the like think by contributing to this post with their thoughts.

Some of the Challenges Artists Face Promoting their Music (a video)

While concept stage Immitter seems to be trying to develop a music promotion engine, I'm not sure what tools they'll provide to artists, practically speaking, as they haven't yet developed their initial service (they're still very early stage), but this is a creative video about some of the challenges musicians and bands face vying for exposure to their music:



Founder and CEO, Jermaine Kelly said they're pitching at DEMO this Monday.

Band Metrics Releases Public Beta

Its been a long time coming, but I'm happy to announce that we finally released the public beta of Band Metrics this morning from Midem.

What took so long? Great question. We had to re-engineer the entire system, as the previous two versions were flawed. This was a difficult decision that consumed our time, but it's better to get the architecture right before releasing it to the public. We now feel confident we've built a system, which is entirely Ruby/Rails that will not only collect, store and analyze artist data accurately, but will be fast and scale rapidly, as we also moved our entire system into the cloud via Engine Yard. As an example, Band Metrics now pulls-in and displays initial artist data within seconds, not days or hours. Needless to say, I'm proud of our developers.

We also streamlined the site, and added a couple of new features, including Fan Segmentation and Influence Measurement. Essentially, this allows artists, managers, labels and the like to see a breakdown of fans (based initially on Twitter comments), and a fan's influence among their friends (below is a brief screencast).

We still have lots of work to do, including design enhancements and new features, as well as incorporate our existing analytical tools into the new site (we ran out of time as we wanted to release at Midem), so we greatly appreciate your ongoing support, as this is just the beginning!

Introducing Music Scout

As briefly mentioned last week, I've been quietly working on another project for the past few months, separately from my work on Band Metrics. Needless to say, I'm pretty tired, but today I'm pleased to announce that the initial beta of Music Scout is live.

While there's still a ton of work to do, and the design is rudimentary, we wanted to go ahead and get it out there so we could get some feedback, and incorporate your changes and feature requests, as we've got a significant product road-map for Music Scout in 2010.

Essentially, Music Scout is location-aware mobile music app for the Android and iPhone that enables music enthusiasts to express their thoughts and sentiments about the band they're watching in real-time directly from the venue. Not only can users rate and express their feelings about a band or musician, but Music Scout will begin to trace and identify the individuals that are actually scouting and discovering the next hot bands before they become known acts, providing of course, they're using the service, but to help encourage use we're building in a future reward system.

But it's not just a tool for music aficionados, critics and music lovers, just imagine the kind of feedback that this app could produce for a band, manager, A&R rep, etc. - from the live sound, to the songs selected for each show, to the venue, etc.

The Android app is available now for FREE, and the FREE iPhone app will be available once it's approved by Apple (should be in about 2 weeks). Again, this is just the initial release - we have miles to go before we sleep.

Benefits of Twitter Lists for Artists

Most everyone now has Lists enabled for their Twitter account, but what does this mean for you, the artist? Well, there are numerous ways to gain value from them. Below are 4 simple ways you could use Twitter Lists as a tool to help you maximize your tour and net the most income while on the road:

1. Keep track of other bands and musicians by region (e.g. Southeast, Northwest, Central, etc.), so while you're on the road you could see what they're doing and possibly headline swap, invite them to share the stage with you, meetup, etc.
2. Keep track of venues by region. Similar to above, the difference is that you're looking to see if there are any last minute openings or opportunities you may have not been aware of before hitting the road.
3. Keep track of your top fans by city (fan segmentation). Building relationships with your fans and superfans is vitally important, especially if you're trying to pack the house each night, and this is a great way to segment them via Twitter (tip: you may want to keep these lists private).
4. Discover. By doing the above, or creating another type of list for your band, you're going to discover some interesting people, artists, fans and more - nothing but a good thing, and it works equally for people discovering your band as you get added to Lists, which could open up more opportunities for you, so be creative and build some Lists.

There are lots of other ways Twitter Lists can help your band, these are just some examples to get you started. How do you plan to use Lists?

Band Metrics on NPR

If you were listening to NPR this weekend, you may have caught a fantastic segment of On the Media called "Charting the Charts" by Mark Phillips, airing on over 100 U.S. radio stations yesterday and Saturday. It's a must listen for anyone interested in music charts like Billboard's Hot 100, as Mark eloquently explores how the art of ranking artists has evolved, and where the evolution is headed from industry leaders like Robert Levine of Billboard, Chicago Tribune music critic and author Greg Kot, Chris Molanphy of Idolator, Eric Garland and myself. If you missed the show, you can listen to it here or below if you have Flash enabled, and many thanks to Mark for his excellent research and production - it was an honor to be a part of it.

Inference is the Difference: Gaining Insight from Music Data Analytics

One of the goals of Band Metrics is to help artists and music industry professionals gain insight from the quantitative and qualitative data we collect, as identifying correlations can be the difference between increasing revenue for your band, or spinning your wheels guessing as to how your fans interact, share and listen to your music. Below are two recent screencasts that help demonstrate a couple of the areas we're working on to make meaning out of your music data (view more of our screencasts here).

The first screencast demonstrates how radio play data (soon social data) could help you build relationships with broadcast stations that are, or are not playing your music. The second one provides a suggested tour map based on the data we're collecting about your band. These are both experimental mapping features at this point, one of the reasons why we're still in private beta, but we thought you might like to see them if you don't have an account:

Characteristics of Sound Data Analysis for Artists and the Music Industry

At the core of the analytics engine Band Metrics is developing for the music industry is a Decision Support System for artists and music industry professionals, something we've been professing since the formation of our business plan. But, there are several characteristics our data analysis should have before it can draw significant conclusions about artists and their songs - this is one of the reasons why we're only visualizing artist data and insights at this time. Here are a few aims and characteristics for our data analysis, relative to the analytics we're providing and developing:

• Longitudinal: simply put, we make sound correlations when the artist data we analyze has been collected over an extended period of time, so we store all data for each artist ad infinitum
• Quantitative: diverse structured data that can be measured in terms of units, for example, the number of radio plays or fan interactions an artist has for any given time period - we're doing this now from almost ten different sources, but we'll continue to add more
• Qualitative: diverse unstructured data that aims to gather an understanding of why attitudes and behaviors are formed towards an artist, for example, why are music enthusiasts listening to a particular artist, and what are the social constructs that have influenced the fan base - we're doing the initial work for this now by pulling artist comments and reviews from two different sources (soon to be five), but we have a great deal of development that still needs to be done
• Spatial: diverse geographic data to draw correlations and patterns - we're doing this now with the Artist Mapping Platform we invented, but much more work still needs to be done
• Cross-sectional: meaning, deep and diverse artist data from within various sociographic populations and genres
• Iterative: our collection processes, data sources, statistical calculations, descriptive insights, predictive/forecasting models, recommendations, visualizations, etc. have to be continually evaluated and improved - it's a process, not an end

There are other characteristics as well. Not to mention, our data analysis needs to account for missing artist data, duplicate data, and outlier data, among other data variables. So, we're continually improving Band Metrics, as data collection and analysis is both an art and a science that is evolutionary, so be skeptical of sweeping claims about artist correlations from general observations, as the cause might be linked to something else.

Two Quick Band Metrics Demos

Below are a couple of quick screencasts on using Band Metrics. The first one demonstrates how to view historical data for an artist. The second one shows how to add and manage multiple bands within one account. As we make enhancements to Band Metrics, we'll provide new screencasts. If you have any questions, let us know here.

Tell Us What We Need To Know

We're now releasing new features and/or enhancements at least one per week, and we'll continue to do so from now on, but we want to make sure we're building the features you need, so please let us know what you would like to see us build. You can post your comments here or on help.bandmetrics.com.

Yeah, we know there are a couple of companies that have recently launched trying to imitate us and they've been actively following our news (even using our service), so your feedback will give them more free "product research," but hey, what can we do, as we're believers in working and collaborating with our users and the music community in an open conversation.

Band Metrics Adds Multiple Band Management

If you haven't yet noticed, we quietly released our latest product feature earlier this week that allows you to manage multiple bands through one login - it's a fantastic tool for artist management companies, labels, venues, A&R reps, promoters, music supervisors, publicists, marketing agencies and others. We're still tweaking it, so please let us know how we can improve.

Btw, this is a premium service, so please call us to get access at +1/404.492-6511.