Jimmy Iovine: Beats Music Service Will Share Listener Data With Artists

By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.

One of recording artists’ biggest complaints about every major music service, from iTunes to Spotify, is not about money — it’s about data. Maybe the solution is for music intermediaries to deliver both.

As Zoe Keating put it so well, it seems unfair to artists that big music stores can contact customers directly to buy or listen to certain artists in order to make their services more attractive as products — but that artists themselves can’t contact those same fans. So when it’s time to go on tour (i.e. try to pay some rent), it’s harder to let those people in those towns know about it.

Beats Audio — the upcoming music service from Beats by Dre, whose leaders include Jimmy Iovine (traditional record business), Ian Rogers (digital music business) and Trent Reznor (artist, boat-rocker), which will ostensibly be build atop the MOG music service that Beats acquired last summer — is doing exactly the opposite. Beats will tell artists which people are using the service to access their music, so that those artists can contact the fans directly.

When Keating proposed that she would rather be paid in that data possibly including the email addresses of listeners, privacy advocates freaked out on Slashdot.