By Hannah Karp
The music industry has long feted its star executives for their
gut instinct and intuition. But for the past few years, the world's
biggest record company has started evaluating employees by a less
sexy measure: their interest in big data.
At Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, a database built years
ago by interns has evolved into a robust analysis tool that has
become central to the company's business plan. Created to help
employees make smarter marketing decisions, the system, known
within the company as Artist Portal, allows users to track and
compare artists' sales, streaming, social-media buzz and airplay
globally in real time, while offering insight into the driving
factors for spikes and dips in each metric.
By overlaying data sets such as an artist's television
appearances and concert dates, airing times of TV shows or
commercials featuring the artist's songs, social-media posts,
Internet leaks, and the amount of money spent on promotion,
marketing executives using the system can quickly see which efforts
moved the needle and adjust their marketing plans accordingly.
The system also reveals which employees use the system most
frequently and how, and which aren't using it at all--information
that senior executives can turn to when making staffing decisions
within their business units, according to a person familiar with
the matter.
The music business might seem a bit late to the party, with
industries from fast food to pharmaceuticals rarely making moves
based on anything but the numbers. But Universal's system
represents a sea change in an industry in which executives
acknowledge that typical marketing presentations about an artist's
traction until quite recently were based more on gut instinct and
Google Inc. search results than on internal data--which could take
days to painstakingly collect.
Universal's head of global digital business, Rob Wells, said he
envisioned a world in which a band could exit the stage, go into
its tour bus and see immediately how many of each one of its songs
had been sold, streamed and shared during or after the performance.
That isn't possible yet, he said, "but we're very close."
Joey Swarbrick, an artist manager whose clients include the
British hip-hop duo Rizzle Kicks, said that he can now track
airplay and preorders in real time instead of waiting for Universal
to cough up weekly reports. In turn, that means he can "be more
aggressive with the label--if I see that the record is connecting I
can say we need to make sure we spend" more to promote it, he said.
If a record isn't connecting, he added, he can advise against
"throwing money down the drain."
Artist Portal was conceived about five years ago by two of
Universal's technology experts, who said they were inspired by
software that could scrape and aggregate information from multiple
sites, just as travel websites do with airline prices. The first
two versions of the system were built by company interns, both of
whom have since been hired full-time. Now, two years into its third
iteration, the database is still evolving as its architects work to
clean up and organize new chunks of what the tech team calls
"dirty, grubby" raw data and present it in a user-friendly way.
While the system isn't aimed at discovering new talent, it can
be used to help forecast the potential of future signees, based on
the trajectory of similar acts.
Universal's competitors, Access Industries' Warner Music Group
and Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment, are catching up
fast.
About a year ago Warner Music launched an early version of its
Artist Dashboard, a system similar in functionality to Universal's.
Warner's international head, Stu Bergen, said it is now being used
by a broad swath of the company's marketing and promotion staff.
Recently, he said, Warner gleaned from its system that one of its
acts, a pop band from Los Angeles called Echosmith, was gaining
remarkable traction in Southeast Asia, so the label decided to
launch the artist there before the U.K. or Australia, more
traditional starter markets overseas. Warner also plans to give
artist managers access to the system when it can handle more
users.
Sony Music Entertainment has also created dashboards that
combine its artists' airplay, sales, social-media information and
other data, but the company relies more heavily on human analysis
of its data by an analytics team that has grown by roughly 50% to
about 25 people over the past two years.
Sony also has a "social listening" system that quantifies buzz
and interprets slang to give a better sense of how an artist is
resonating in the social-media universe. It can decipher, for
example, when fans are writing words like "bad," "sick" or "bitch"
to convey criticism or praise.
The new analytics systems have shifted the industry's focus from
sales to studying fans' listening habits. In Finland, for example,
Universal has been using Artist Portal to persuade concert
promoters to bring hip-hop acts to Helsinki, a tough sell in the
past, because Finns have never bought many hip-hop records. But
earlier this year Universal Music Finland's marketing director,
Kimmo Valtanen, demonstrated for a group of local promoters that
rap star Kanye West's hits were being streamed by Finnish fans with
steady frequency, while his Finnish fan base was mostly between 18
and 24 years old and composed of equal parts male and
female--indicating that Mr. West could sell out an arena there,
said Mr. Valtanen.
No decision has been made yet on whether to book Mr. West into a
coming show, which would be his first nonfestival headlining
appearance in the nation.
"Everything used to be based on a feeling," Mr. Valtanen said.
"Now we have the facts."
Write to Hannah Karp at hannah.karp@wsj.com
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