Pandora will soon start offering a new service called an
Artist Marketing Platform to artists that are played on Pandora stations. The
service will give artists a trove of demographic information about their
listeners, such as age, gender, how many people are listening, and even a map
of where fans are listening from. The tool is similar to Chartbeat, which is a
measurement tool that many online media publications use to track web traffic.
After digging a bit further into Pandora’s business model, I
was surprised to learn that there is significant tension between the music
industry establishment and streaming music services like Pandora and Spotify
over publishing royalties. Pandora claims that it can be an incredible tool to
help artists reach a mass audience, while several big names in the music
industry think of Pandora as little more than thieves, so it will be
interesting to see how artists and their labels react to this offering from
Pandora. Considering 80% of artists played on Pandora don’t get played on
traditional radio, this tool could help up-and-coming artists and their labels
and managers make better-informed decisions going forward, such as where to
tour, what songs to play at their live shows, what songs to promote as singles,
and which local radio markets to target. On the other hand, some artists could find
the tool to be worthless and nothing more than an attempt to pacify artists
upset with Pandora’s royalties arrangements.
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