Spotify is failing music artists with substandard analytics
As part of my work with Delfina, I regularly conduct audience audits for organizations and brands. This means taking a deep dive at analytics across platforms to draw insights about audience behaviour, and suggest ways to increase customer/fan engagement via content.
I recently created the brand strategy for an independent, award-winning music artist’s upcoming project, and had to conduct an audience audit of their fan base. This was the first time I had the opportunity to look at Spotify data from an artists’ side, and what I saw wasn’t pretty.
I was stunned by the lack of data that was made available to artists. The following examples are filled with jargon, so bear with me:
Spotify analytics offers no way to disaggregate data by age, location or gender, especially when looking at each song individually. This is a problem, because songs appear to perform differently across markets and audience segments. The data that’s made available deals with an artist’s audience taken as a whole, which makes it very hard to understand why songs perform differently, how to predict future behaviours, and how to market individual songs effectively.
Spotify only provides data on countries and the top 50 cities where listeners are located. It doesn’t show data at the sub-country level, e.g. regions, provinces and states. This gives the false impression that audiences live in the world’s largest cities. The artist I work with has an international audience, and their Top Cities chart tends to list major cities like Paris, Mexico and Tokyo. It doesn’t necessarily mean that’s where most people really are; they could very well be located in secondary cities, or even rural areas, but we’ll never have a full picture from looking at Spotify alone.
Have you noticed artists sharing their end-of-the-year Spotify statistics on social media? Those data are mostly useless for marketing. Spotify gives the number of people who’ve listened to an artist’s tracks on repeat, without any other information that may understand the profile of those most engaged listeners (e.g. age or location). It also says nothing of traffic sources to an artist's profile or song. Were they referred by an ad? A website? An article? Spotify obviously has the answer to those questions, but isn’t sharing that information with us.
There is no possibility to download data in usable formats for Excel or other data-processing tool. This makes it difficult to manipulate data to yield insights, e.g. by comparing Spotify data to Deezer. (Some third-party services do give that option.)
Those are only a few examples of features that are essential to a strategist or marketer—they’re provided by other services like Google and Facebook, whose business is built on the ability of brands to understand their audience in order to buy more ads. No other industry would content itself with such a low quality of data, but somehow this seems to be acceptable in the music industry.
In the example above, you can't click on countries to see a breakdown of listens per region or city.
This is useless to me if I can't get a breakdown of each category by the factors that matter to me. For instance I'd like to know where those listeners are located, which playlists are they listening to, how they come across an artist's profile, etc. These data could be interpreted a million different ways, leading to a million misguided decisions.
(Side note: I’m also not impressed by Spotify’s playlists, both curated and algorithm-generated. They play very little role in the overall number of streams, and operate in such a random way that it seems impossible to strategize around them. If the algorithm was so good, why isn’t it doing its job of pushing tracks to potential listeners?)
Judging by its messaging, it’s clear that Spotify wants artists to believe that it’s THE main platform that drives audience growth. It claims to help artists understand their audience, while saying nothing of the blatant gaps left by the data it provides. By looking at the artist’s data from other sources, including other streaming providers and social media, it was immediately obvious that a good chunk of the artists’ audience was not using Spotify to listen to music, and was therefore not covered by the data. If we hadn’t looked elsewhere, we would have missed on sizable market opportunities in countries where listeners use Deezer, Apple Music or Youtube as their main source of digital music.
That an artist should perhaps look at other data sources to really understand their audience is never suggested by Spotify in any of their educational content. Sure, Spotify has every right to market itself that way, but customers increasingly demand transparency from brands, and omitting those critical pieces of information from their messaging could one day backfire. I always recommend brands to place users at the center of their content strategy, and deliver real value through content. Brands that are truly audience-centric will not hesitate to talk about their rivals, if that can truly serve their audience. Brand trust is one of the most under-valued currencies in the marketing world these days.
This is the extent of educational resources provided by Spotify to help artists read data. I'm not impressed.
To be clear, it’s not that Spotify doesn’t have this data. It’s that it doesn't want to give it to artists. And musicians don’t know they’re paying for a under-performing service because they’re not data-literate and don’t understand how things could be different (the same dynamic is at play in the journalism industry, where I come from, and where platforms like Substack claim to help independent writers build a career without supporting them with the data they need. Most journalists don’t know how to look at a dataset, and wouldn’t know they’re not getting the value they pay for.)
Labels are supposed to handle marketing, and therefore data, but my understanding is that they haven’t been doing a very good job at it. (There’s a clear gap between what the data says about the artist I’m currently working with, and how they’ve been promoted by their former label. Were those decisions a result of ignorance, incompetence or neglect? I don’t know.) Artists are now leaving major labels in troves, joining indie labels or even going independent and striking their own deals with distribution companies. But in many countries, ownership of data goes to the rights holder, which tends to be the label. This means that when an artist decides to part ways with a label and go independent, they lose years of data on consumption patterns and audiences, thus making any strategizing around marketing and distribution incredibly more difficult.
So here’s what I recommend for artists as they learn about the importance of data. Remember, I don’t come from the music industry, I only like building brands and looking at data for fun (and sometimes write about it too), so don’t take my advice at face value:
If you’re signed to a label, keep the admin rights to your digital distribution platforms and social media, or at least request shared control. Request transparency of data, and to be given access to data on a regular basis;
Whether you’re signed or independent, create mechanisms to collect and analyse data across multiple platforms to get a holistic view of your audience (Spotify, Deezer, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, social media, etc.)
Learn the basics of analytics so that you know how to use it yourself, or what to demand from your label;
Cultivate long-term engagement over virality. Virality is random, and chasing it will burn you out. Most streams on Spotify seem to come from the artist’s own profile, their own playlists and from the Release Radar. It makes more sense to concentrate your energy on building a strong fan base through a solid multiplatform engagement strategy. I’m not saying to forget virality altogether, just don’t make it your only focus.
Never put all your eggs in the same basket. Don’t rely on Spotify alone, either for music distribution or for analytics. A good strategy helps a brand reach people wherever they are, and whichever platform they use, not the other way around.
Your feedback on this is more than welcome. I'm still building an understanding of this and forming an opinion on how to best support artists with data.
If you know artists who need help making sense of their data, send them my way. If you’re curious about what audience audits can do for your brand, say hello@delfina.studio.