The lack of data and analytical intelligence made trends and locations more difficult for artists, record labels and the industry to navigate. “We were wandering in the dark,” Umek says.
enter slovenian start up Vibration. Founded in 2015 by DJ Umek and his two managers, Vasja Weber and Matej Gregoric, the platform aggregates data from major streaming sites, global ticket sellers and 24,000 radio stations in 150 countries and translates it into an online profile for musicians.
The start-up aims to revolutionize the use of data in the music business. “The music industry is one of the coolest industries out there, but the figures aren’t that high, and we’re tying those two worlds together,” Weber explains.
Vibrate’s online dashboard chart provides a variety of insights, including rankings, social media engagement, and fanbase demographics. For the 500,000 artists around the world who use the platform for a fee of €59 ($66) per month, the dashboard can help them understand where to focus their promotional efforts.
Umek says, “I always go and compare my profile to that of other similar artists… and then there’s a clear indication that I should be investing more time, maybe more money, in a platform or social media, so it doesn’t help me. Career will help.” ,
change industry
Tatiana Sirisano is a music industry consultant and analyst at entertainment intelligence company MIDiA Research. He believes we are seeing an emerging trend where, rather than releasing music videos for singles prior to an album release, artists increasingly “release their albums, go to social media, analyze Let’s check it out, find out what songs people love the most and then from there say ‘It’s a single, and that’s what we’re going to put our music video budget on behind.'”
As well as artists, Viberate has 150,000 venues and 6,000 festivals using the site, most notably Insomniac, America’s biggest promoter of electronic music festivals, and the UK’s Glastonbury Festival.
Sirisano says analytics has also changed the way record labels work. “Data has completely changed the way talent scouts at labels work,” she observes. In the past, scouts would “go to gigs and listen to artist demos that were mailed onto a CD … an artist who’s probably bubbly and how many streams they get per month.”
By recognizing the importance of data, music is following in the footsteps of other industries. “There is IMDb in the movies and Airbnb and Booking.com in the tourism industry, and those services were bringing the entire industry together,” says Viberate co-founder Weber.
Viberate is one of several data analytics companies aimed at the music industry, which include Chartmetric, Soundcharts, and SongStats. But some worry that too much focus on data analytics could compromise the inventiveness of music. “The music industry is inherently a creative place,” Sirisano says. “This is the art we are talking about. It is really hard to take an overly quantitative view on that.”
Instead, she advocates that data be “a jumping-off point” by which artists, labels and places make their decisions. DJ Umek takes it a step further and argues that “data doesn’t kill creativity, it complements it.”
Looking to the future, Viberate aims to make data accessible to every musician. As Weber puts it: “In five to 10 years, being a musician and not having a profile on Vibrate will be like being a guitarist without a guitar.”
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