Musicmetric is a web analytics platform that recently launched a Pro edition in Beta. It offers an impressive range of stats on everything from social media activity to mentions in articles on websites. One of the most noted features in recent media coverage is their tracking of file sharing activity. Access to such data also powered a midem Hack Day app called TourrentPlans that helps musicians plan tours based on the location of their filesharing fanbase.
I recently spoke with Musicmetric Co-Founder Marie-Alicia Chang who filled me in on some of the aspects of Musicmetric's new Pro edition that might miss casual inspection.
Lana Del Rey Filesharing for 2 Months Prior to Album Release
When checking out Musicmetric Pro, I decided to take a look at the profile of Lana Del Rey, since this week's album sales are supporting my thesis regarding her crossover from early adopters. Stats tracked include social media activity, from the number of fans on major sites to plays of music and videos to the locations of fans. You can get an extremely limited sense of what Pro offers via the free Fantracker service.
Musicmetric Pro also includes a section that's still in development that will offer info regarding mention on websites, such as blog posts and music news, as well as sentiment tracking. But folks in the press have gotten most worked up by the filesharing stats currently featuring the amount of filesharing and the location of filesharers.
Additional features include the ability to create benchmarks and compare artists to other artists in order to get a context for the data. Even more useful is the ability to highlight specific events, such as tv appearances, in relationship to web activity such as filesharing.
Ms. Chang revealed that accounts representing specific artists also have access to Nielsen data and can integrate additional private data sources. So, though their free Fantracker tool reveals some interesting data about artists, the Pro version offers a powerful ability to integrate public and proprietary sources to track an artist's development.
In addition to marketing firms and labels, Ms. Chang noted Musicmetric has deals with such companies as MTV that have extensive web properties and tracking needs. Though they may extend their services beyond music, their focus is on developing tools for the day to day needs of the music industry
Ms. Chang also affirmed Musicmetric's ongoing involvement with Music Hack Days and their creation of APIs that offer data to developers. One example of the possible uses of such data occurred at midem Hack Day where Musicmetric engineer Ben Fields created TourrentPlans by mashing up MusicMetric filesharing data with Songkick historic concert data.
TourrentPlans combines these information sources to create tour plans based on where an artist has the most fans as identified by filesharing activity. Though this won't settle filesharing debates, it certainly suggests one of the best approaches available for monetizing filesharing.
Musicmetric Pro is definitely a powerful tool for music-related web analytics. It also represents a likely direction for best of breed web services for the music industry as more and more features scattered across disparate services are combined in an accessible form. Music tech has some big years ahead and Musicmetric strikes me as one of the likely winners in the current race.
See Musicmetric's Products page to find out more about the Lite and Pro editions or to sign up for a free 10 day trial.
Hypebot Features Writer Clyde Smith maintains his freelance writing hub at Flux Research and music industry resources at Music Biz Blogs. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
