From Label Managers to A&Rs: Data Is Your Perfect Sidekick

Urska Jaksa

Oct 19, 2020

Honestly, staying on top of every important happening in the age of digital media is a never-ending story. Luckily, some data crunching can put things in order so you can stay on top of them and make less risky decisions. As a music data company who loves working with numbers, Viberate is here to do the hard part for you, so you can focus on your job better. 

If you're an A&R representative, work for a label, or are in another field of the music business, this is how you can use music analytics:

🥇Find emerging artists and tap into rankings across genres, countries, and channels.

📈Learn about artists by checking their social and streaming stats.

🧠 See what’s happening in different genres to make informed decisions.

🌎 Get insights into music markets worldwide.

Viberate is on a mission to kick the luck factor out of the industry's formula for success and replace it with information. Let's take a couple of examples out of the Viberate analytics playbook to tick all the boxes above.

#1 Find emerging artists and tap into rankings across genres, countries, and channels

Charts can help you find new talent to add to your roster, check who’s ruling the platforms, see where specific artists rank, and do your bookings with less risk.

✔️ The good thing about data is that it can help you see trends. Using Charts on Viberate analytics, you can discover emerging musicians through different combinations of filters. For example, you can find out which US Indie Pop artists got the most SoundCloud plays in the last 12 months. Check it out below.

📌 Find Emerging Artists with Charts

#2 Learn about artists by checking their social and streaming stats

By looking into an artist’s audiences, social and streaming metrics, as well as their top-performing content, you can stay informed about the artists on your roster or check if a specific artist fits your brief.

✔️ In the Viberate analytics example below, you can see the comparison of an artist’s overall fanbase and engagement during a one-year period. The bottom line on the left: when engagement grows parallel with the fanbase, the artist is on a healthy career trajectory. And on the right side: the red engagement line staying above the fanbase size line is a good indicator, because it means the audience is highly engaged.

📌 Learn About the Artists Through Their Stats

#3 See what’s happening in different genres

With the right set of data, you can identify the countries with the most event and festival activity in the genre you're invested in, find the fastest-rising artists, and determine the strongest social media and streaming channels that you should focus on, see how fast they’re growing and how engaged the fans are.

✔️ Here's an example from Viberate analytics. It shows how the fanbase of the top 3,000 Electronic artists grew in the last month. You can see that Spotify, YouTube, and Instagram are the channels with the biggest increase. This suggests you should put special focus on them when planning a release, gig, tour, or any kind of promotional activity.

📌  Make Less Risky Decisions with Genre Insights

#4 Get insights into music markets worldwide

Getting a complete overview of the local market is possible even if you aren't an enthusiast of data-mining. After you screen a market, you should be able to assess the opportunities for the artists on your roster or the potential for events and festivals of different genres.

✔️ Below you can see a City Map of Live Performances in the UK. It shows the cities in the country with the most festivals and events according to the Viberate database. When planning an event or festival, focusing on hotspots reduces the risks, because they indicate there’s an interested audience. In the example of Glasgow, the top genres are Pop, Rock, and Classical, and there are 205 live music Venues and 10 Festivals.

📌  Do All Your Country Research in One Place