 What's going on it's your man Kory. Welcome to the Digital Dash. I'll be giving you guys tips on how to market your songs and get those numbers booming. Now today as you can see I have two guests with me my god Jason and my god Walker. These two guys are data nerds like myself. They happen to work for a very wonderful company trying to measure something that we actually use on outside with our clients and stuff and they've actually written a couple of articles that have kept me up late at night as a research and different thing y'all talk about. So I figured you know why not get them on here so they can break down some of these ideas and theories themselves to you guys. So with that being said I appreciate you again for joining me guys. Yeah man thanks for having us. Thanks for having us Kory. Yeah man no doubt. So just before we get into some of the general topics I know you guys are much bigger than your jobs and your roles at Trout Measures. So if you can give our audience a little background about yourself what got you interested in some of the things that you're interested in today and how did you get into the positions that you guys are here now? Oh me first? Yeah. So I've been playing music since I was like eight I think. I took a little break from that to go to college study poetry there and neuroscience and then I graduated and I was like well shoot might as well play music again. So I did that for a while like touring and you know playing shows and all that that you know indie music life essentially and then I wanted to get into the because as you can't really be an artist these days without knowing some part of the business without being some part of the business. So I wanted to become as knowledgeable as I could. So then I enrolled in a master's program at NYU for music business music technology and through that I met Jason and started working for a chart metric doing digital marketing digital strategy stuff last year. And then for me before chart metric my main work experience was actually in the military I was a cryptology officer in the US Navy so that was a really cool job but I really you know the job was basically taking lots of disparate data and then trying to make sense of it you know what actions you know can we take from it were the things to pull away and that is like the general skill set I still kind of still really use in the music industry now. So it's for me after I left the Navy it was a matter of joining that mindset with the thing that I was very passionate about which has always been music in my life. I played P and L as a kid and I'm old enough to have been into the crunch era. So you know I play guitar I was in bands too and I still make music to this day and I approached the business side from the heart of a creative person and so I think having those two mindsets helps me do what I do here and you know it's been just really fun working with Rucker here in New York. Okay that's dope man um yeah Rucker you specifically I didn't I wasn't aware that you were ours before this was it was it easy for you to start kind of getting into the the more analytical stuff coming I guess I'm trying to think of the questioners and that's like because we have artists all the time who they want to dip into the analytical side but they find it difficult or they're just not used to breaking through those things was it a difficult process for you to start to get into the backhand number side um for me I in college I was like a research assistant for like I was running neuroscience experiments and stuff so I had a background in it a little bit um but it really came from you know how do I promote my music how do I leverage based on the fact that I don't have you know major label support so how do I leverage my own power to get my music out there and you know data was really the way to do that um so it is largely self-taught through just through being in the industry and trying to promote my own music okay okay that's dope man um so let's dive into chartmetry then so like I said it's something that we're very familiar with on the outside we use a pretty good amount um but for those out there who aren't familiar with chartmetry who don't know what it is can you guys explain to them what exactly it is kind of the mission of it and then some of the things that you guys actually help us do yeah um so chartmetrics vision is like we want to free up creative people to do what they do best which is write songs which is you know make tracks which is go out and tour and play shows um and we approach that from the perspective of a tech company so you know we're a small team we've been growing a lot but we're still only like 12 people it's nothing compared to like some of these massive labels that um yeah we are honored to have this over customers but you know it's kind of we we approach it from a data perspective because in 2020 we're in this world where you have all your social media platforms you have all your digital streaming platforms um and whatever else that you might be interested in like for example like we collect data from how many Wikipedia views do I have or how many hits you know if you've got some songs on Genius you know because people are really interested in new lyrics like we include that stuff too so there's just so many areas where like numbers are now a very native part of your career as an artist just like Worker was saying earlier so we act as kind of an intermediary between all those kind of like streams of data that are coming from different places and putting it in one dashboard you can access from your laptop from your phone and we try to make sense of it for you as an artist or for you as a manager, for you as a label, for you as a lot of other different people that are involved with our product and what I mean by that is so not only do we have computer engineers that do a lot of the collecting and the cleaning and the organizing of data because we can get into that later but a lot of time it's a huge mess we spend a lot of time trying to organize it and make it simple and easy to understand through like these visualizations but we also use data science techniques which I know is a huge buzzword nowadays but kind of one of our value added is you know if you have 20 different data streams it's you know you can look at each one of them separately but what if we put them together you know what if you just want to get an idea of how popular you are compared to other artists that's a hard thing to kind of put into a concrete number or a concrete you know comparison with other artists that maybe are in your same genre so we use data science techniques because that field allows us to like synthesize a lot of this random information that can be it's really just noise when you just look at it and like you know 20 different google sheet tabs it's just noise it's just a bunch of stuff that the human brain just can't make sense of it but we use a lot of these data science techniques to try to just kind of condense it down to something just like that's really easy to understand and like ranking for example yeah okay okay so it's because that's that's kind of thing that I've always liked about tri-metric because it seems to be making um like definitely the data side the data driven side of the music industry a lot more viable to people who have never even thought to really get into data-driven marketing which um I like I said thank you guys for that because that's opened up a lot just I think it's helping to make the industry look more transparent especially in the world now where everyone is so numbers driven and where I was inflating numbers it helps to have something to go like all right man here's some measurable metrics that you can look at outside of just a high-fowl account or whatever it's something worth it to move into so um moving on to like I said I want to get into a couple of specific things that you guys have talked about um once again for you guys watching they are also contributors to the tri-metric blog y'all have written like that that's the topics that I personally um just tapped into just to kind of explain things that I always thought but there was never any like I would never had was able to touch any hard day to prove it or just like concepts and through that I've even heard other marketers talk about but like I said they didn't have the data and the numbers that you guys helping to get so one specifically that inspired a recent video of mine um I did a video talking to artists about just the benefits of marketing themselves to audiences outside of the US alone and that video was inspired by an article from you guys decide um about trigger cities so can you touch on exactly what trigger cities are maybe even a few of them and yeah just how artists can benefit from looking at those places as potential fan markets absolutely so um trigger cities is a concept that was coined by our chief commercial officer his name is Chaz Jenkins he's a British music executive and uh his background is global marketing and he he's been kind of in the business for um at least a couple decades now maybe even more he started out as a club owner so he has a very kind of 360 view of the business and via his kind of specialty was always looking at the world and how it consumes music in different ways and he found that because of you know once youtube came out in like what 2005 what was that yeah and then the DSPs eventually came out um a little bit afterwards uh it it kind of it was like the second you hit upload like you're instantly global at least the your the ability for someone halfway around the around the world to consume your video or you know your vlog you know whatever it is you put out as an artist and it just it's a completely different mindset and the idea of trigger cities that there's several cities throughout the world that because of the streaming kind of new paradigm whatever you want to call it they are starting to at least the assumption is they're starting to influence or at least have a significant weight on how these platforms uh how they measure consumption because before for example like in the traditional you know american music industry or i i should say western english speaking uh industry it was about york it was about chicago it was about atlanta it was about you know london you know a lot of the kind of like big traditional cities that were considered like the epicenters of like culture and entertainment and those were the taste makers but with the idea of trigger cities is now we're looking at like south baloo in brazil we're looking at lima um peru we're looking at jacarta indonesia bangkok thailand huge huge cities with um crazy population counts that now because we've kind of leapfrogged you know the desktop you know laptop era into like the mobile phone era where everyone's got one and in a lot of these markets uh data is actually quite cheap and they can stream as much as they want and so for example one of the uh kind of like analyses we did was we looked at like youtube view counts for artists in like a one month period and uh the top 10 cities were i think mostly from like india and like southeast asia and nowhere like new york was like the first like you know western city and that was like maybe in like the high teens you know what i mean so it was like it really put things in perspective in terms of you know you have these huge populations that weren't considered you know traditional kind of like movers and shakers in the global entertainment industry but now because you know streaming has like liberated like whatever kind of like local market kind of business dynamics that just kept things limited to like you know if you were living in the uk it was all about london if you're living there you know wherever it was all about the major cities it's kind of like allowed these cities that you know were kind of always they all have their own like huge music histories themselves but they were just kind of putting their little box because like the way the business infrastructure was set up was it just kept all these people separate so we wrote a series of three articles a mini series talking about southeast asia and we talked about latin america and then we had a third one talking about kind of like both and just talking about how you know if you're an artist today and you're putting out music you know you're doing an instagram campaign or you know you're doing something on tiktok or whatever that you should at least have this as like this is the new world we live in and you know i think it's worth saying too that you shouldn't try to market at least i wouldn't think you would want to market to like everything yeah but the menu is just bigger now you know you just never know like this data thing you know we're really just i like to think we're just measuring like love like what love like where is the love from your fans coming from and where are the fans that you don't even know that you could have coming from like you could put out a track and for whatever reason it's like resonating and like i don't know uh you know you put out a love song and it's like really huge and like like manila in the philippines and you don't probably could even point to what i'm at um but you're like oh my god like they really love them like this this ballad i just put out um maybe i should pay attention to them and you know focus my you know my next social media campaign towards that city um that's kind of the power of the data um and the idea of trigger cities that we try to um at least just shed some light on so people can think about kind of the way they distribute themselves in any way yeah and it correlates just like you said how global um like the music industry really has become out the gate where we used to feel like we need an expensive booking agent or you know a couple thousand dollars on a plane ticket to get to these fans in these other countries when like no actually it becomes um from my experience it's a little bit cheaper to even target some of these markets so that was kind of things that was interesting to me it's like jakarta is a really huge city on their list but advertising costs a jakarta a little like pennies on the dollar so in that you can get in front of a larger fan base for literally a fraction of the costlet it would take to get in front of a fraction of those people in the u.s i think i think it does tie into a lot of that so would you recommend that is it something that you would recommend an artist who is building a fan base out to date to look into pushing themselves to these places or do you see it as something to look at maybe once that kind of collect a little bit more data about the fans around them to then start looking into these markets yeah um so i mean a part of the the this mini series that we wrote about um trigger cities was actually getting into like what were the local music tastes um and i think that part is really important because at the same time what we're talking about these huge streaming numbers coming from these you know these cities it shouldn't just be a numbers game like it should be more like get to know them for like what the thing like what are they listening to and if it happens to align with whatever you make as an artist then i think it's an opportunity um i think the wrong way to go about it personally speaking is oh sweet there's a bunch of people in Rio de Janeiro like let me try to just like get some numbers in Rio de Janeiro even though it has nothing to do with like the kind of music you make i just think i think that's the wrong way to go about it i think it's more about let me learn a little bit about you know oh rock is really big and like Rio de Janeiro like you know rock in Rio it was like this huge festival that's going for a long time and um it's got other kinds of music there too but um rock is really big in not only brazil but other parts of latin america you know if you happen to be you know uh you've got a band and you guys do rock music like that's obviously a region you should you know look into because there's just for some whatever reason for cultural reasons that are beyond my knowledge right now i'm sure there are a lot of historians that could talk more about it but it's just a popular genre there and then i mentioned manila before like in southeast asia like for whatever reason um i so i'm actually filipino american i i came back from there not too long ago uh and they just really love just like i won't say easy but just like really just like earnest kind of hard on your sleeve like love songs i just love it like we love singing stuff like that you know with nice melodies and there's no swearing and it just like super just like you know um really like easy going love songs like that that crowd just loves that so if that aligns with your music and i think it's worth doing um i think i might have talked myself in a circle i forget now at this yeah i think it's just about about um you get as much as things are global we also have to think locally or regionally um and be sensitive to those those differences really but also it depends on your goals um what it really has opened the door for is like a more targeted like niche approach to to building your career as an artist really you don't have to be this huge you know superstar that's known around the world you just you know appeal to to those who actually care about your music whether it's mario yeah that's interesting we have a we have a client we were working with recently and he dropped the song maybe three weeks ago and he had never been picked up by an editorial playlist um his songs always did really decent but with this song dropped for whatever reason we still aren't privy onto why but he got picked up by a bunch of new music friday playlists like india malaysia yeah all of these like uh these southeast and asian countries and it skyrocketed his song like he really grew like 900 to a thousand followers over the last couple of weeks and even when we were talking about it yeah exactly it was crazy man is while the song went from maybe 20k to 100k over those like last two weeks the thousand plus followers all off of those markets even his related artists in the regions that are showing up on his stats are starting to change based on it and the thing he was asking is like what do i do next and i'm like well man you know luckily for you a lot of these countries are not expensive to target you like you could probably get in front of a good measure of these people for the budget that you have um to work with so we've always kind of approached it with data collection in mind is if you don't have thousands and thousands of dollars to build out um you know potential audience or at least collect data on how to find your potential audience in the u.s you can easily run a 200 all that add to some of these other countries and still collect really valuable data they can still have to make those decisions that's kind of and even i know we have um my friend managers in the heart is by the name of naya briggs and she has a huge fan base in japan just because she got placed on to this anime she's the senior vocal for this anime um i can't think of the name on top of my head but just seeing what having access to that type of audience versus like no she has a fan base here in Atlanta but it's a complete different like she has a really solidified fan base there and i've been trying to use as a great example for ours to look at taking a more global approach because i think a lot of the artists here tend to look at it like if they're not popular around the people that they can touch or get to then they don't feel popular if i was looking at like they spend money the same they stream the same you know i'm saying they love you just the same so these are all still viable places to dip into so that's um yeah that's really dope so are there any on that list of those trigger cities that like stand out to you is just i don't know maybe being the hubs where maybe um a good majority of artists have popped their careers off but seem to be like markets where um well let me tie it back so i've kind of noticed one of the trends of major labels seems to be when they sign a new act they'll build them up internationally take them to these markets through whatever connections they have for tours and then use that well not experience but use those i guess resources gain from the tour to come back and kind of build them out in the u.s so are there any markets that you've seen have been like good places for um i know you said it's a lot it's mostly based on general music and the culture of the area but are there any specific regions you have seen to be just a good place for maybe really any artists to start looking to try and build well for example um mexico city is like one of the biggest you know streaming cities in the world really on on the whole um but there's a big market there for like rock and indie rock um so you you do have to think um sort of in a targeted way like it's it's not like um you know a huge sort of like pop artist is necessarily going to pop off in the same way in mexico city as they will in another city so i think you do have to still think about it in a targeted way but mexico city is a good example where the streaming numbers are insane and so if you're like an indie rock artist for example who is struggling in you know america for example that might be an option to look at and i know jason has looked at some southeast asian um countries and like pop artists that have popped off there as well yeah yeah um and to add to that i like one of the other kind of like analyses we kind of ran for this trigger city series was like shazam charter currencies so we would look at like these cities because we have them shazam puts out these charts at the city level so it allowed us uh to like localize basically like what are people in various cities pulling their phone out to shazam and essentially using that as like a a way to kind of get an idea of like what are the sounds that the city is interested in um and you know so if you're a hip hop artist like maybe you don't maybe you don't but like paris like loves hip hop like yeah like paris is just like a huge like hip hop um kind of like fan there's a huge fan base there you know uh i think it was a berlin super into like a lot of electronic music like like electronic like music clubs are like huge in berlin like you know like they're it really just i mean if you you probably know what if that's our your genre but it just gives you some more confirmation and a lot of times uh you know some surprise to to understand like where your stuff could actually take off in um but i think it's important to remind people that like just like rucker said it really just depends on your goals like maybe you just want to be big in your state you know like there's nothing wrong with that like what if you got a family you don't want to be touring the world and like you just like you just want to like have fun like on the weekends play a few shows here and there and and that's like total respect like that's like totally cool um but you know it maybe you want to make it the little side income you know from streaming dollars you know from you know some of these cities that are broad yeah um i think that's that's all that stuff is is totally worth thinking about because it's all in the context of their goals because not everybody can or even wants to be you know drake or Beyonce or Ariana Grande you know i mean it's just not there's only room for so much of that in in pop culture so um it really just depends on what you want to do with it okay yeah i completely agree man um so moving into i want to get into playlisting a little bit just because that's that's originally what attracted me to chart measure was uh it used to be that uh using chart measures kind of like uh to look at the growth history of a playlist i see now that you guys have or have been offering for a while the estimated um percentage of listeners of the playlist that are actually like engaged on the playlist so recently Spotify has removed the ability to see the listener account for certain playlists on what i'm not gonna start i think it's all playlists at this point but be able to see the listener account for playlists um and that's kind of impacted one of the main strategies i think a lot of indie artists were using was using that to gauge how effective a playlist would be and also using it to gauge if the playlist will actually be um if it's a scam playlist or not so uh what are some of the the back end numbers that you guys look at on the chart metric side to determine if a playlist is even worth investing their time into um do you know by the way if that's happening on the artists like like Spotify for artists back end no they can still see it they can still see on the back end but you can't see it on the front end yeah okay so yeah i mean just to to elaborate a little bit more on what you're mentioning in terms of what we measure so we basically have this way of um gathering the amount of monthly listeners you essentially get um potentially could get from a playlist um so essentially you know you open up your Spotify app and you go to the about section and it used to be before the recent updates you could see like the top five playlists that that particular artist um got in terms of like the monthly listeners so essentially in the past 28 days which is what Spotify you know calls you know a month um and running because it always stays kind of like up to date how many different people streamed this artist on that playlist at least once okay is basically how how we understood it and so you would see a count and you'd see these top five playlists and so essentially what we could kind of do is kind of like be able to collect that and then we can except now sort it instead of the artist just focus on the playlist and then we can look at a bunch of different artists and we can understand now you know what is the range of monthly listeners that you know you could potentially get as an artist looking at all these other artists and you know it was useful for a lot of our users to be able to kind of engage um engagement for a particular playlist and give some kind of like rough estimate of you know expectation right because just because a playlist has a certain amount of followers isn't necessarily mean that um it's always getting listens um there's an article that uh Rolling Stone put out um I think it was like maybe late last year about how there are a couple Spotify playlists I think it was comparing a pollen and um what's one of the what was one of the top Spotify r&b uh playlists I can't think about the top of my head not r&b it's not just r&b I think it might be like alt r&b or like something like that but it actually so essentially it's comparing like they're both playlists that had music that worked basically in the alternative r&b genre but one had more followers and I know pollen had less followers but there was much more engagement on pollen yeah right so you know so it's it's such a great uh article because it really talks about like you know you can follow a playlist you know today's top hits on Spotify it's like by far and away the number one was found playlist um but at the end of the day it's also just like a one-time act from the user perspective you know I see a playlist oh cool I jammed on it for like you know a half an hour I'm gonna click follow but what if I never really go back you know what if I just forgot about it what if I just what if for whatever reason I just never clicked on it that follow account still stays and so it looks good for the playlist but when it comes to actual engagement um I'm actually going to this pawn playlist because I always know like the curation on the playlist is like sick I'm always learning about new artists on there it's always got this vibe that I always dig um maybe I just like so I've even forgotten to click follow on it you know what I mean like you know it's just this is the kind of area where data can be really useful if you take the time to really understand what these numbers mean you know youtube view does not equal a Spotify spin does not equal a spin on the radio you know they all say one but they all mean different things you know what I mean it depends on how people are coming across that particular view or spin or listen or whatever um so I think if when people take the time to really understand um the meaning of each number and what it means in your career I think that's when you start to really get some more value out of the two like charm metric or you know honestly even outside of charm metric there are a lot of other really useful tools that you know you can as long as you just take time to think about what it's measuring and what it means to your audience I think that's kind of what the real value is yeah and I think that I think that it goes to like the fake spotting fake playlists or fake streams or profiles or whatever is is understanding that it's not a single metric it's the relationship between those metrics like how are the followers relating to the monthly listeners if the monthly listeners are crazy high but the follower count is crazy low and something's up yeah if it's vice versa something is up there too um it's it's the relationship in which um they're playing and they're growing really um that matters that allows you to tell like is this legit is this gonna do something for me yeah a lot of this also just kind of like sinking your teeth into knowing what numbers I understand knowing like you said looking like ah this place is getting 10 000 listeners a month but they have three followers like what's our we've seen cases of um which I'm not I'm always never sure if it's because followers lost interest in the playlists or they just were using like body methods or something but we've seen players with 100 000 followers that only get like a couple hundred listeners to it like I think yeah you're right like it's being able to just identify what those red flags look like from a data standpoint before you just jump at a playlist because they have good front end number exactly yeah so um another thing that I've always thought was interesting about playlists in general was that um user-generated playlists outnumber the amount of official playlists on Spotify like they have a very um they're what one of the maybe the only streaming platform with that heavy of a user-generated playlists because I don't think Apple doesn't really have a huge user-generated playlists I know these are the rest of them really don't and I know Rutger you you wrote an article talking about um just breaking down um breaking down some of the more popular independent curators on Spotify so can you speak to one um I guess being able as an artist to utilize these different indie curators before trying to jump to some of these major playlists and then one what have been some of the best ways that you've seen to kind of like find these these actually like really powerful independent curators the ones who are actually competing because I've seen like some of them actually compete with the major Spotify playlist but I get more listeners than some of the major Spotify playlists yeah so what I really wanted to do with that article is like sort of break down sort of tiers of these playlists and curators and to have people like go explore themselves what a lot of people don't realize is so we have a filter where you can exclude um Spotify or major label brands and I think a lot of people don't realize that outside of Spotify editorials which are obviously huge because they're they're Spotify there's um three major label um curators as well um and those are uh filter digs are in top spy so those are all owned by major labels so they're not really independent curators so it's important to know that first of all because if you're pitching to them you know probably not the best avenue to go down um so we have a filter where you can exclude you know Spotify and major label brands and you can look at you know the truly like independent curators and um see how many playlist followers they have um 28 day change ratio or percentage change in those followers so you can really filter what tier of independent playlist is right for you because just because it's independent doesn't necessarily mean it's the right one to go for because it's huge you're still not going to get through if you're just starting out you know um so it's really up to you to again it goes back to setting your goals and knowing where you're at in relation to your goal it's up to you to to do that sort of self-filtering and be realistic about like hey I can target this smaller playlist and that might lead me to this bigger playlist and we actually have a feature called playlist journeys where you can see um the essentially the the the journeys that tracks take through playlists so you can sort of see what playlists feed into what other playlists um so what smaller playlists the song started on to get it to a bigger and bigger playlist um but it is really on on you to interpret or your team to interpret to interpret that for you for your goals it's not just going to happen automatically that's a difficult part are you able to tell from your side um because I like I said I think is I think it's interesting that there are indie curators who's a playlist network rival the major playlist so are are you able to see any trends in like playlist growth like maybe specific things that the curators are doing to grow their playlist that large um have you noticed anything um like in terms of like the track selection and like how they well maybe not even that more so like growth tactics like we we interviewed a playlist curator here once and he was telling us one of his big strategies was he would change the name of his playlist to a popular album um yeah yeah so yeah that's I mean that's one thing you can do is like search engine optimization so yeah I've noticed that with and this is not like the most ethical thing but like some playlists will literally copy a bigger playlist like word for word and so they get the search engine optimization from those from that from the association with that bigger legit playlist so that's like a unethical way that some people do it uh which I wouldn't I wouldn't recommend so that's another thing to look out for though you know because you could be looking for New Music Friday and it's not actually New Music Friday it's this other New Music Friday probably asterisk yeah yeah exactly what was that uh soundcheck is for euphoria yeah it was like the HBO series with Zendaya yeah um a really popular show has a really like co-following to it and uh there's the official soundcheck on Spotify has like excellent followers but like this other one from like a third party curator that is also title euphoria whatever whatever has like at least like two x like followers if not yeah yeah it's like outstripped the actual playlist um that said so like plagiarism not cool but there there are like you know strategic keyword things you can do um you know if you know like what people are searching for what they're into that's part of what being a curator is is just knowing what people are into what their um their tastes are what they're um going to be interested in that's just an extension of what the curator is really as long as it's not plagiarism yeah I mean I think it's probably whatever whatever like uh engagement tactics a curator does within a DSP is probably fairly limited I would say yeah outside of that kind of SEO type stuff yeah I think probably if anything what they can do uh more for themselves as a curator is probably outside of it whether it be social media yeah definitely um appearances at like music conferences you know putting out you know a free PDF you know book about you know dope music and like taste and stuff like that like this I think anything they can do together or following outside of DSPs themselves is probably a better use of their time yeah that's definitely not much other than expertise I know that much yeah but and you know when it comes down to it knowing good music yeah yeah that's step one yeah that's the other thing is because I've noticed there's one really popular in the curator I noticed they always get to like all of the big movie releases and make playlists right months before like it really seemed like the moment they announced that it's even in works yeah the playlists made for it it's always crazy um yeah all right cool so so um going back to um I think there was an article I read about um just kind of looking at a lot of like cross platform activity and then using it almost as like a like a mock a nr type of thing to be able to just no I don't want to say yes but be able to make like educated guesses on what artists are going at the kind of pushing themselves the right way so um I don't remember which which one of you wrote uh so not bad about that but can you speak a little bit more on using like cross platform data to for um artists to be able to I guess determine one if their marketing strategies are working and then two I guess for being able to identify maybe like other possible opportunities that they didn't see or didn't know about before um so this might be in reference to an article that I wrote recently um with our data scientist Josh um so this sort of goes back to the relationship between different metrics we looked at um you know patterns of early growth essentially for artists and we were just you know giving a snapshot of different possibilities for trends you might see um so like one was was just straight growth across all platforms obviously that's a good sign if it's you know healthy solid growth across all platforms that's you're doing something right and you should continue that momentum um there was another one that was the monthly listeners were just through the roof but the followers were not keeping up with that and we looked at why that was and it was someone who had been added to a bunch of like classical concentration playlist because it was really like pleasant piano music um so for him or for that artist maybe their goal isn't to be a touring artist maybe they just want to land on these um playlists and get some residual income from that and they are totally succeeding in that regard um but but understanding the relationship between how those uh trend lines how those different metrics um how they relate to each other and how they grow together or not grow together we'll tell you something about um either something that has worked for you or something that you should continue to uh or shoot for I guess yeah yeah I thought it was interesting in that because I remember the example of the guy he had about what like 1.2 million listeners off of playlists and his growth count didn't didn't really go up so yeah all right I didn't think just so why maybe that was was it maybe like the wrong selection of playlists that he was in or just I think it was optimization things yeah I think he's just like he's not it wasn't like an artist's profile you know people were just just listening passively to the very pleasant songs which is totally fine um you know there's no right way to do music or to grow yourself as a musician really um some people grow themselves as a brand um some people grow themselves as like a functional use of their music like to help relax people or whatever yeah there's no right avenue to go down it's just knowing what your goals are and um knowing how to um understand your data to achieve those goals yeah all right have you guys noticed um if other platforms tend to pay attention to how artists is moving on one platform does that do you see that effect like for instance if a if an artist's song is let's say going viral on Spotify is there usually a correlation between like the apple numbers going up or maybe the search for it going up on YouTube have you have you guys noticed things like that on the back game or is it or is it because I it feels like a vague question they're saying out loud because I've seen isolated incidents where we've encountered artists who do crazy on Spotify as long as in hundreds of thousands crossing millions but then their apple monthly listeners aren't necessarily saying but then we've also seen um we've had clients for we'll see them get picked up by editorial playlists or major playlists on Spotify and then like days later apple music picked them up on another playlist as well so I was just wondering if you guys had this have you seen anything in the back end to kind of like correlate with that short answers no but but it's it's it's because we actually haven't looked I mean I think that's a really cool thing for you to bring up because yeah honestly just we haven't even thought about that I think it makes sense that the curators at Apple or Spotify or whatever DSP are thinking of that they're obviously looking at each other I mean you know Nike and Reebok and Nadeedas they're always looking at what each other what each other are doing on the shoot like so it just makes sense that they're paying attention to each other and so if someone catches on to a new artist and they're they're is doing well on you know stream platform a then stream platform b is probably gonna try to get a piece of that because you know if if like the general streaming audience is really digging an artist and they're not onto it yet that's yeah I mean it's just a classic you know no please listen to that person on us with us um so that makes sense on kind of like a competitive level um but that that feature that Brecker mentioned earlier this playlist journeys things that we have we only do it right now within each DSP so we look at the way the way Spotify playlists relate to other Spotify playlists and also that with Apple music but um we could totally do it from in between streaming platforms um it would be a hell of a calculation and it would take a lot of computing power but I think I think we it's it's possible yeah I mean that said um we came out with uh so Jason and I write um I mean we have another one in the works but we read these semi-annual reports and um the last one we did uh we looked at the top 30 playlists across four um DSPs and we did sort of like a genre uh artist genre and artist geography distribution and there were some differences in terms of like what genres tend to do better or are added more to the top playlists um so there is there are some differences um obviously I I don't know how dynamic that is in terms of like how often that changes but Amazon you know is known for being really big for country artists yeah um so and like these are is I mean what we discovered through our data analysis is like really big for like Latin and Caribbean genres so there is in a more macro sense um you can think about it that way as well the like there are platforms that the audiences with certain genres of music do tend to migrate to these platforms a lot more because I mean I was like it seems like rap and pop dominate Spotify but I have noticed the Caribbean music like Afro music that type of stuff seems to dominate these platforms okay okay I mean that's that's what our our analysis suggested that yeah um I don't know that we could we could say like definitively like this audience base is more this but in terms of what genres were added to the top playlists if you take that as an indication of that okay then yes yeah okay yeah okay also worth mentioning too like you know after oh you select okay I'm also worth mentioning too that um you know Apple and Spotify aren't the only you know players in the business oh yeah you know it's it's worth mentioning depending on the kind of music that you do like like what if you're like what if you're like a Brazilian American you know artist you know and you don't even know that these are exists yeah but you grew up speaking like Brazilian Portuguese in the house and you could do it in your music but like whatever I'm just gonna you know I you know I grew up in the States and I you know I'm gonna sing in English that's cool and all but dude like if it's it's you know small fish in a big pond you know what I mean like you could try and I don't think it's I think it's totally like a valid option but like it might be worth considering like why not see what I could do on this you know DSP that you know hasn't had as much mind share as Spotify and Apple you know and kind of like every day but they've got a huge international audience especially in Latin America and especially they have some really dope curators um and like the Brazilian space like because Brazil is a whole other world out to itself and they do a really great job of localizing within each culture and making really great playlists in that culture so you know for that kind of artist like they might be really cool to like when we try to like you know make some waves here because maybe a lot of people not as many people are looking here and I could really you know do some damage I think that's a really cool like Google tactic that you know if you're down to do it I think it's it's worth looking into some of these other DSPs as well okay yeah I agree that goes back to the whole globalization of music and then going where there's clearly an interest but it hasn't come over saturated with artists kind of trying to attack it because I think that's that's it seems to be what happened to with Spotify a lot of the people who were on to Spotify players like really early on like years ago like they just tell me stories all the time about how how easier it was to work yeah every artist knows that oh shit I should be on Spotify I should be working these tablets and doing these things right right which right now that's TikTok right like you know like the you know a few years ago was Instagram and again it was like 2006 like I'm going to vlog on YouTube and that's like the new thing like yeah it's it's always like every few years like a platform comes out and it's kind of like it's like the golden era where like every all the gates are open and you know creativity is at like an apex because no one really knows what to do with it yet like right now like I feel like it's just growing out of like the preteen doing cute dances on on TikTok like it's it's finally growing past that and people are doing other really cool things on TikTok but like it's still very much in its like golden age and so like it's that's it that's you know we have TikTok charts on our platform and um people are super super interested in it but you know just from a bigger perspective like it's always going to be a new platform so I think for artists to like really keep their minds open into what is gaining more traction and how can I make my own personal you know kind of impact on it with in an original way is always going to be I think a key thing for for people as time goes on yeah yeah like be first be dope before everybody else realizes you can win over that yeah yeah and know know who you are and if you know who you are and what your what your goals are you're gonna better be able to take those opportunities when they come yeah okay okay cool um well that was pretty much everything I wanted to cover with you guys man like I said it's just with a couple of topics and things from heart because I read from you guys that I wanted to I was going to do videos on the people actually come and break some of this stuff down so I don't misconstru anything so that any any last you know data-driven pieces of wisdom any any any general advice that you can give just based off all of that stuff yeah anything um I feel like we said most of it yeah I mean we got it in know who you know who you are know your goals um seize those opportunities when they come but also yeah those numbers yeah I'm a I'm a push from different angle like hey don't like if you're a starter not as honest like don't feel bad if you don't like pop off like little nuts x like yeah yeah you know like from the get go like dude like it's okay like then don't get down yourself like it I've it one of the things that I always try to keep conscious of because I work for a data company in a creative business is like like we're we're here to to measure things and stuff but like it don't think that just because you don't see the numbers you want to see in the in the outset that it it means that your stuff is not good yeah I think I think it's so important to as an artist to protect that party that's creative and sensitive and um you need to if as long as you you know you click upload and every time you play it you're like you know that's don't you know I like you and your friends are like you know are really digging it like in the car and stuff like at the end of the day like that's the most important thing and then I think if you just keep focusing on that then the numbers will follow but um don't get too um you know blinded by the numbers and don't get too down yourself if you don't see the things that you want to see in the beginning because um I think that's not your purpose as an artist I think your purpose as an artist is to create um you know really like just honest and fun or sad or whatever it is that you make and and just then make it from the heart and all this data and all this business stuff it'll come as a but you gotta like focus on that stuff first because that's the most important thing um yeah yeah I'm gonna say that and I also say it from a from um from a self-promotional perspective um if if if your audience is interested um we're happy to extend like a like a free premium trial uh period on Trump magic if they want to check it out um I'll put out the code of brand man um if that sounds good um they can go into the settings create a free account and if they want to put in brand man the coupon uh code in their settings um they can get a free trial and then if you're in shit um by all means reach out to us if you want to talk about it um you'd be happy to talk with you all right that's cool and I'll link that social in the description below so you guys can check them out come and find them I'll talk to y'all and see what platform y'all want to come reach out to you on uh so other than that if you feel like you learned anything today please like and share this video hit those post notifications as well as I wouldn't want you guys to miss anything once again my name is Cory these have been my guests Jason and Rugger appreciate y'all again for coming out um and I'll see y'all next time peace peace it's the mat work