How to Turn Music Data into Actionable Insights: This article is the first one in the series. It reviews all layers of the Data Pyramid and shows how to turn raw data into actionable insights. 

An Overview of Data in The Music Industry: This article presents all types of metadata in the industry from factual (objective) metadata to performance metadata. It is an essential guide for music professionals to understand all the various data sources available for analysis. 

Making Sense of Music Data – Data Visualizations: This article discusses the second step of the Data Pyramid – Information and how information can be presented in the form of data visualizations, making it easier to comprehend large data sets. 

At this step, attempts to look into the future and predict outcomes are made. The more specific the problem or context you’re observing is, the more precise your findings will be at this step. The Knowledge Layer produces analytics that help benchmark performance. As Liv Buli from Berklee Online University puts it, at the Knowledge layer you can tell that the artist of a certain size sells well after performing on the TV show and use this information to guide strategy for other artists of the same size. As a result, knowledge makes it possible to look at data in the industry-specific context and understand how you compare in relation to past successes and to competition. In that regard, benchmarking and setting expectations is the final outcome of the knowledge step. 

Benchmarking can take different forms within the music industry: 

Types of benchmarking 

• Process benchmarking

This type of benchmarking deals with processes and aims to optimize internal and external processes in the company. You can improve the process by looking at what competitors are doing or setting one process against another. Processes relate to how things are done in the company, for example, the process of uploading songs to the catalog. 

• Strategic benchmarking

Strategic benchmarking focuses on the business’s best practices which is often more complex than the other two types of benchmarking and includes: competitive priorities, organizational strengths, and managerial priorities. For example, an assessment of how fans responded to the brand sound in the past can help devise a long-term sound branding strategy.

• Performance benchmarking

Performance benchmarking compares product lines, marketing, and sales figures to determine how to increase revenues. For example, as a marketing campaign for a music release develops over time, it can reveal the most vital money channels for exposure. Sales figures can indicate how artists compare to one another in terms of profitability. 

1. Analyzing hit songs and popular artists to discover new talent

You can utilize Cyanite’s technology to analyze what’s currently working in the music industry in different markets. In particular, you can analyze popular songs and understand what makes them successful in terms of audio-based features such as genre, mood, energy level, etc. Further, you can use the Similarity Search to find tracks with a similar vibe and feel. It then helps you discover and identify new talent which may go along the same lines as current successes. Of course, that is not the whole story of making a hit but it gives you a pretty solid foundation of hitting the current zeitgeist.  

2. Analyzing popular playlists to predict matches

We specifically described this use case in The 3 Best Ways to Improve your Playlist Pitching with CYANITE article. You can analyze existing popular playlists such as Spotify New Music Friday or Spotify Peaceful Piano and see what songs are usually featured. This information can then help to understand the profile of the playlist which allows you to find the perfect fit and increase the chances of getting into the playlist. It also supports you in describing the songs to the editors in the way that song is accepted.  

3. Analyzing marketing and sales numbers to allocate marketing budgets and support event planning

For example, record labels can analyze the performance of their artists and adjust marketing campaigns accordingly. Insight can help change the direction of the marketing campaign, choose appropriate channels, and allocate marketing budgets more effectively. In events planning, you can analyze event venues and identify the most relevant cities and venues based on past events. 

4. Analyzing the artists’ styles to identify opportunities for song-plugging

If you’re a music publisher looking to get a placement on a new release of a successful artist, analyzing their previous style and matching it to your catalog of demos would be the way to go. 

In this case, some audio qualities of the song are not important, as it will be eventually re-recorded. To analyze songs, a regular Cyanite functionality can be used including the Keyword Search by Weights where you can search your demo-catalog by the analysis results of the successful artist on weight-specific keywords to get the most relevant results. 

5. Analyzing fan engagement to identify audience segments

You can also analyze artists’ performance by looking into fan engagement on social media and music platforms. Through understanding the fan’s demographics, interests, and lives, you can create custom audiences for new artists or deepen fan engagement for the same artist based on past campaigns. This use case has been thoroughly described in the article How to Create Custom Audiences for Pre-Release Music Campaigns in Facebook, Instagram, and Google.

6. Analyzing trending music in advertising to find the most syncable tracks in the own catalog.

Sync licensing which includes finding the sync opportunities and pitching specific songs can benefit from data analysis and benchmarking. Trending music in brand advertising can be analyzed to reveal the brand’s sound. This sound will then be matched to specific songs in your catalog making a strong case in the pitch to the brand in terms of sound-brand-fit. If you are interested in this use case and how data can be used in sound branding and sync licensing check out the interview we did with Vincent Raciti from TRO – About AI in sound branding.

– Knowledge is about the past, not the future. At the knowledge layer, you only have information about what happened before. Usually, information about the present (though some tools provide access to real-time data) or the future is not taken into account. It is important to remember this limitation as past performance is no guarantee to future results.

At the stage of Information, data is structured and organized so it can be interpreted. Information requires less time to find relevant data but there is still a lot of effort involved. 

At the Knowledge level, information is put into context and can be used for benchmarking and setting expectations. This context can be historical and involve past successes or it can relate to the position of others in the market. What kind of knowledge is derived from information depends on the initial data set and on the ability to store the memories of past successes. This process of turning data into knowledge takes a whole new form when machine learning and deep learning techniques are used as they significantly speed up the process of data collection and can memorize tons of data. However, a lot of knowledge in the music industry is still derived manually by looking at the past outcomes and trying to apply them somehow in the present.  

If you want to get the first grip on Cyanite’s technology, you can also register for our free web app to analyze music and try similarity searches without any coding needed.

This article is a continuation of the series “How to Turn Music Data into Actionable Insights”. We’re diving deeper into the first layer of the Data Pyramid and explore different kinds of metadata in the industry. 

Metadata represents a form of knowledge in the music industry. Any information you have about a song is considered metadata – information about performance, sound, ownership, culture, etc. Metadata is already used in every step of the value chain; for music recommendation (algorithms), release planning, advance payments, marketing budgeting, royalty payouts, artist collaborations, and etc. 

Nonetheless, the music industry has an ambivalent relationship with musical metadata. On the one hand, the data is necessary as millions of songs are circulating in the industry every day. On the other hand, music is quite varied and individual (pop music is very different to ambient sounds, for example) so the metadata that describes music can take different forms and meanings making it a quite complex field. 

This article intends to explore all kinds of metadata used in the industry from basic descriptions of acoustic properties to company proprietary data. 

The article was created with helpful input from Music Tomorrow:

There are various classifications of the music metadata. The basic classification is Public vs Private metadata: 

• Public metadata is easily available and visible to the public.  
• Private metadata is kept behind closed doors due to legal and security or because of economic reasons. Maintaining competitiveness is one of these reasons why the metadata is kept private. Typically, performance-related metadata like sales numbers is private. 

Another very basic classification of metadata is Manual vs Automatic annotations: 

• Manual metadata is entered into the system by humans. These could be annotations from the editors or users. 
• Automatic metadata is obtained through automatic systems, for example, AI.

1. Factual (Objective)

Factual metadata is objective. This is such metadata as artist, album, year of publication, and duration of the song, etc. Factual metadata is usually assigned by the editor or administrator and describes the information that is historically true and can not be contested. 

Usually, factual metadata doesn’t describe the acoustic features of the song. 

Besides the big streaming services, platforms like Discogs are great sources to find and double-check objective metadata. 

2. Descriptive (Subjective)

Descriptive metadata (often also referred to as creative metadata or subjective metadata) provides information about the acoustic qualities and artistic nature of a song. These are such data as mood, energy, and genre, voice, and etc.  

Descriptive metadata is usually subjectively defined by the human or the machine based on the previous experience or dataset. However, BPM, Key, and Time Signature are the exception to this rule. BPM, Key, and Time Signature are objective metadata that describe the nature of the song. We still count them as the descriptive metadata.  

Major platforms like Spotify and Apple Music have strict requirements for submitted files. Having incomplete metadata can result in a file being rejected for further distribution. For music libraries, the main concern is user search experience as categorization and organization of songs in the library rely almost entirely on metadata.

Companies such as Cyanite, Musiio, Musimap, or FeedForward are able to extract descriptive metadata from the audio file.

3. Ownership/Performing Rights Metadata

Ownership Metadata defines the people or entities who own the rights to the track. These could be artists, songwriters, labels, producers, and others. These are all sides interested in a royalty split, so ownership metadata ensures everyone involved is getting paid. Allocation of royalties can be quite complicated with multiple songwriters involved, songs using samples of other songs, and etc. So ownership metadata is important.

Companies such as Blòkur, Jaxta, Exectuals, Trqk, and Verifi Media provide access to ownership metadata with the goal to manage and track changes to ownership rights of the song over time – and ensure correct payouts for the rights holders.

4. Performance – Cultural Metadata

The performance or cultural metadata is produced by the environment or culture. Usually, this implies users having an interaction with the song. This interaction is then registered in the system and analyzed for patterns, categories, and associations. Such metadata includes likes, ratings, social media plays, streaming performance, chart positions, and etc. 

The performance category can be divided into two parts: 

• Consumption or Sales data deals with consumption and use of the item/track and usually needs to be acquired from partners. For example, Spotify shares data with distributors, distributors pass it down to labels, and so forth. 
• Social or Audience data. Social data indicates how well music/artist does within a particular platform plus who the audience is. It can be accessed either through first-party tools or third-party tools. 

First-party tools are powerful but disconnected. They require to harmonize data from different platforms to get a full picture. They are also limited in scope, meaning that they cover only proprietary data. Third-party tools are more useful. They provide access to data across the market, incl. performance for artists you have to connect to. In this case, the data is already harmonized but the level of detail is lower. 

Another way to acquire social data is tracking solutions (movie syncs, radio, etc) that produce somewhat original data — these could be either integrated with third-party solutions (radio-tracking on Soundcharts/Chartmetric, for example) or operate as standalone tools (radio monitor, WARM, BDS tracker). It is still the consumption data but it’s accessed bypassing the entire data chain.

5. Proprietary Metadata

Proprietary data is the data that remains in the hands of the company and rarely gets disclosed. Some data used by recommender systems is proprietary data. For example, a song’s similarity score is proprietary data that can be based on performance data. This type of data also includes insights from ad campaigns, sales, merch, ticketing, and etc. 

Some of the proprietary data belongs to more than one company. Sales, merch, ticket sales — a number of parties are usually involved here.

Today, processes in the music industry are rather one-dimensional when it comes to data. For instance, marketing budgets are often planned merely based on past performance of an artist’s recordings – so are multiples on the acquisitions of their rights. 

Let’s look at the financial sector: In order to estimate the value of a company, one has to look at company-internal factors such as inventory, assets, or human resources as well as outside factors such as past performances, political situation, or market trends. Here we look at proprietary data (company assets), semi-proprietary data (performance), and public data (market trends). The art of connecting those to make accurate predictions will be the topic of future research on the Cyanite blog.

Musical metadata is needed to manage large music libraries. We tried to review all metadata types in the industry, but these types can intersect and produce new kinds of metadata. This metadata can then be used to derive information, build knowledge, and deliver business insights, which constitute the layers of the Data Pyramid – a framework we presented earlier that helps make data-based decisions. 

In 2021, every company should see itself as a data company. Future success is inherently dependent on how well you can connect your various data sources.

Please contact us with any questions about our Cyanite AI via sales@cyanite.ai. You can also directly book a web session with Cyanite co-founder Markus here.

If you want to get the first grip on Cyanite’s technology, you can also register for our free web app to analyze music and try similarity searches without any coding needed.

Decisions in the music industry are increasingly made based on data. Services like Chartmetric, Spotify for Artists, or Facebook Business Manager among others are powerful tools to enable music industry teams to back up their work with data. This process of collective data generation is called datafication, pointing at the fact that almost everything nowadays can be collected, measured, and captured either manually or digitally. Data can be used by recommendation algorithms to recommend music. This data is also an opportunity for the stakeholders to make business decisions, reach new audiences in the market, and find innovative ways to do business. 

However, decision-making from data also requires a new level of analytical skills. Simple statistical analysis is not enough for data-based decision-making. The amount of data, its complexity, and challenges associated with storing and synchronizing large data require smart technologies to help manage the data and make use of it. 

This article explains the general framework for data-based decision-making and explores how Cyanite capabilities can lead to actionable business insights. It is specifically tailored to music publishers, music labels, and all types of music businesses that own musical assets. This framework can be applied in a variety of ways to areas such as catalog acquisitions, playlist pitching, and release plans.

So how are data-based decisions made? The framework for decision-making is based on the Berklee University Data Pyramid model by Liv Buli. In the next parts we outline the 4 steps of the model and add a certain Cyanite layer to it:

1. Data Layer
2. Information Layer
3. Knowledge Layer 
4. Intelligence Layer

1. Data Layer

At the very first layer, the raw data is generated and collected. This data includes user activity, information about the artist such as social media accounts and usernames, album release dates or concert dates, and creative metadata. Among others, a technology like Cyanite generates creative metadata such as genre, mood, instruments, bpm, key, vocals, and more.  

At this stage the data is collected in a raw form, so limited insights can be made out of it. This step is, however, crucial for insight generation at the next layers of the pyramid. 

It’s also important to remember a general rule of thumb: the better the input, the better the output. That is, the higher the quality of this initial data generation, the better insights you can derive from it at the top of the pyramid. Any mistakes made in the crucial data layer will be carried in the other layers biasing insights and limiting actionability.

Our philosophy at Cyanite is to have a  reduced set of data output in the first layer to help accuracy and reliability. The data is presented in readable form in the Cyanite interface. You can see what kind of data Cyanite generates in this analysis of Spotify’s New Music Friday Playlist. 

2. Information Layer

At the information level, the data is structured and visualized, often in a graphical form. A first glance at data in a visual form can already bring value and enable the company to answer questions such as: “What happened with the artist, playlist, or a chart?” 

At each stage of the pyramid, an appropriate analytical method is used. The visualization and reporting methods among others at the information stage are called descriptive analytics. The main goal at this stage is to identify useful patterns and correlations that can be later used for business decisions. 

At this level, there are two main techniques: data aggregation and data mining. Data aggregation deals with collecting and organizing large data sets. Data mining discovers patterns and trends and presents the data in a visual or another understandable format. 

This is the simplest level of data analysis where only cursory conclusions can be made. Inferences and predictions are not made on this level. 

3. Knowledge Layer

The knowledge layer is the stage where the information is converted into knowledge. Benchmarking and setting milestones are used at this stage to derive insights from data. For example, you can set expectations for the artist’s performance based on the information about how they performed in the past. Various activities such as events and show appearances can influence the artist’s performance and this information too can be converted into knowledge, indicating how different factors affect the artist’s success. 

This stage employs the so-called predictive analytics that answer the question: “What is likely to happen in the future?” This kind of analytics captures patterns and relationships in data. They can also deal with historical patterns, connect them to future outcomes, and capture interdependencies between variables. 

At the knowledge level, such techniques as data mining, statistical modeling, and machine learning algorithms are used. For example, machine learning methods can try to fill in the missing data with the best possible guesses based on the existing data. More information on the techniques and advantages and disadvantages of each analytical method can be found here. 

Here are some contexts in which the data generated by Cyanite could create knowledge:

• Analyzing a “to-be-acquired” catalog of music rights and benchmarking it into the existing one;
• Analyzing popular playlists to predict matches;
• Analyzing trending music in advertising to find the most syncable tracks in the own catalog.

4. Intelligence Layer

The intelligence layer is the stage where questions such as “So What?” and “Now What?” are asked and possibly answered. This level enables the stakeholders to predict the outcomes and recommend actions with a high level of confidence. However, decision-making at this level is risky as the wrong prediction can be expensive. While this level is still very much human-operated, machines, especially AI, are moving up the pyramid levels to take over insights generation and decision making. 

Prescriptive analytics deal with cause-effect relationships among knowledge points. They allow businesses to determine actions and assess their impact based on feedback produced by predictive analytics at the knowledge level. This is the level where the truly actionable insights that can affect business development are born. 

Intelligence anticipates what and when something might happen. It can even attempt to understand why something might happen. At the intelligence level, each possible decision option is evaluated so that stakeholders can take advantage of future opportunities or avoid risks. Essentially, this level deals with multiple futures and evaluates the advantages of each option in terms of future opportunities and risks. For further reading, we recommend this article from Google revealing the mindset you need to develop data into business insights.  

At the very base of the Data Pyramid lies raw data. The quality and accuracy of raw data is detrimental in decision making. 

Cyanite generates data about each music track such as bpm, dominant key, predominant voice gender, voice presence profile, genre, mood, energy level, emotional profile, energy dynamics, emotional dynamics, instruments, musical era, and other characteristics of the song. This data is then presented in a visual format such as graphs with dynamic and the ability to choose the custom segment.

Based on different audio parameters, the system determines the similarity between the items, and lists similar songs based on a reference track. From Cyanite analytics, it can be derived, for example, what the overall mood of the library is and different songs can be added to make the library more comprehensive. Branding decisions can also be made using Cyanite, to ensure all music employed by the brand adheres to one mood or theme. 

Please contact us with any questions about our Cyanite AI via sales@cyanite.ai. You can also directly book a web session with Cyanite co-founder Markus here.

If you want to get the first grip on Cyanite’s technology, you can also register for our free web app to analyze music and try similarity searches without any coding needed.