How to Measure Success as a Musician: What data matters?

You can’t grow what you don’t measure, and that is especially true in today’s music industry. From streaming stats to fan engagement, learn how to measure success as a musician.

How to Measure Success as a Musician: What data matters?

by RYAN DILELLO via DIY Musician

You can work as hard as you can, but without metrics and defined goals, you’ll struggle to make progress in your music career.

Data lets you set your own path – with confidence. Understanding metrics around your music empowers you to set real goals, optimize your marketing, and sustain your career. We’ve put together a guide to help you understand what metrics matter for your music and how you can leverage them to advance your career.

Streaming Metrics

Today’s streaming platforms come stocked with analytic dashboards that allow artists to understand the data and trends of listener engagement. Here are a few key metrics you should keep in mind when evaluating your streaming activity.

Monthly Listeners

Monthly listeners indicates how many listeners stream your music per month. This is a robust metric that’s often used as a primary indicator of an artist’s career level. While this number doesn’t necessarily indicate fan loyalty (that would be monthly listeners over substantial time, combined with your follower count), you can use this metric to understand your current reach and reference it when pitching agents, labels, etc. If you want a more granular understanding of your routine listeners, some DSPs like Spotify offer audience breakdowns: programmed listeners, reactivated listeners, superfans, etc.

Followers (on DSPs and Social)

Your follower count on DSPs and social media can help you gauge the size of your loyal fanbase. These numbers are also a better long-term indicator of growth than monthly listeners alone, which can fluctuate between releases and idle periods. Reaching follower milestones allows you to unlock special marketing features on DSPs like Spotify or verified statuses on social media. 

Playlist Placements

In today’s streaming-forward world, curation is key and playlists are one of the central ways artists are discovered. Playlist placements paint a picture of how fans view your music as well as the artists they associate you with. And as a robust metric, total playlist placements can help you understand your music’s popularity. Extra points if you note the saves and followers you’ve gained from playlists to analyze how well your songs are converting listeners to fans.

Marketing and Sales Metrics

Marketing and sales metrics can help you evaluate how well you’re converting first-time listeners into real fans. Together, these metrics show who you’re reaching, where, and how effective your conversion strategies are.

Return on Investment (ROI)

At a high level, your return on investment shows how far your dollars are going in marketing spend at large. It’s helpful to look across channels and calculate a general ROI to ensure that even if there’s a range in performance or timeline for payoff between campaigns and channels, your marketing efforts are still boosting your bottom line.

Regional Resonance

If you’re planning a tour or looking to regionally target your marketing campaigns, DSPs offer insights into geo-location by stream. See where your fans are clustering and you might be surprised! This information allows you to get more precise with your marketing efforts.

Music, Merch, and Tickets

Keep a running log of your album sales, merch sales, and ticket sales by venue to track your progress and identify opportunities for growth. These metrics can help you pitch agents and plan tours, make key decisions about merchandise orders (shirt sizes) and decide on best-selling physical audio formats (vinyl vs CD vs tape). 

Social Metrics

Monitoring your social metrics allows you to gauge what content is resonating with your fanbase, how your profiles have grown over time, and how or where your fans engage with you online. In aggregate, these metrics help you evaluate how well you’re telling your story online. 

Engagement

Set benchmarks for what constitutes a successful post using engagement metrics. Monitor your likes, comments, shares, and saves by post, factoring in watch length for video. Then evaluate your content based on these metrics to help you sustainably grow your profiles across platforms.

Click-Thru-Rate

If you’re not using email within your marketing strategy, you’re missing out on crucial fan engagement. Email allows you to bypass the algorithms, link restrictions, and character limits of social media posts and deliver your content directly to fans’ inboxes. Click-thru-rate is a helpful metric to ensure your subject lines and email copy is resonating with your fanbase.

Mentions

This metric borders on press coverage territory, but it’s a bit more holistic. Often referred to as social listening, take note of the social circles, platforms, and contexts in which you’re being referenced. This is helpful for gauging your community and fine-tuning your target audience.

Press & Publicity Metrics

Securing positive press coverage for your music provides third-party credibility and new fans. Use these metrics to track the value of your PR efforts, monitor your network, and refine future campaigns. 

Press Reach

Maintain a spreadsheet of your press contacts with notes on publication location, type, and reach. In aggregate, this allows you to assess the spread of your PR campaign and ensure you’re maximizing your potential. 

Pitch Success Rate

Calculate your pitch success rate by dividing the number of accepted pitches by the number of pitches sent. A low success rate means you may need to refine messaging and/or identify different outlets. 

Press Quotes and Average Album Score

If your music receives coverage from sites that rated your release, calculate an average score you can reference short-hand. It’s also handy to pull out and document strong quotes to share on socials, in future press kits, and within networking emails.

Community Metrics

How to measure your community varies by artist, but we’re including this category to remind you that the music industry is ultimately about building relationships. It’s crucial to set goals in community-building so that you’re creating a supportive network, not depending fully on algorithms. Here are some ideas to help you evaluate your community-building efforts.

Stage Mates

Sharing bills with local and touring musicians is an excellent way to grow your network and gain new fans. Keep a log of your bills along with information about the artists you played with: contacts, genre, career level, and more. 

Partnerships

If you haven’t already, seek out opportunities to partner with local businesses, online organizations, publications and more around shared interests and initiatives. Whether it’s dropping into a school to teach a songwriting workshop or having a brewery create a beer celebrating your upcoming album, these partnerships can enrich your career. Similar to your stage-mates metric, document the partners past and planned, and set goals around different partnerships you’d like to facilitate. 

Superfans and Fan Retention

Perhaps you’ve noticed familiar faces at your shows or the same names reappear in your social media feed or online merch orders. Take note of these fans and make efforts to reach out personally. Whether it’s acknowledging them at shows or responding when they reshare a post, a little goes a long way! There are also many ways to track fan retention at scale. DSPs offer insights into returning fans over time and some social media platforms offer profile insights to gauge how many of your followers continue to engage with your content.

Conclusion

Metrics enable you to measure against your goals, advance your career, and stay motivated. As you’re preparing to leverage these metrics, set goals across the five major buckets we’ve explored to ensure you’re measuring for the sake of progress.