Yes, but do you have a meme? Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love A&R Research

Whether deciding which song you’ll hear next or which band gets the money to make a music video, data has taken a front row seat in every sector of the music industry including A&R.

By Travis Rosenblatt, founder of A&R platform Meddling

How many sea shanty singers were signed last month? Do you know their names? Will anyone next year? In 5 years?

We’re going to need a smarter boat.

A&R Research is nothing new. You used to call a radio station to see what they were spinning, then call the local record store to see if people were buying it. A&Rs spent a solid decade going through weekly SoundScan reports with highlighters. Now, due to the sudden and complete lack of alternatives, data mining for talent has become the norm (the user base of my A&R platform alone has nearly tripled in the last 12 months). It’s worth taking a step back to understand what it can and cannot do.

Data analytics splits into four basic capabilities, in order of complexity:

• Descriptive (what is happening)
• Diagnostic (why it happened)
• Predictive (what will happen next)
• Prescriptive (what you should do about it)

We know what people care about right now (Descriptive). By knowing how much people care about something right now vs. how much they cared last week, we can draw a trend line to accurately guess how much they’ll care next week (Predictive). However, data can’t tell you if people will still care in 5 years because it doesn’t know why they care. A talented A&R department with diverse perspectives and strong visions for artists’ futures still has to do that.

Data is extremely useful to efficiently flag artists you might be interested in (the number of new artists has exploded in recent years, the number of hours in your day has not), but pattern matching isn’t going to move culture. We need to stop asking what records are “researching” and start using data for A&R coverage instead.

“The first person to bring up either AI or blockchain in a meeting doesn’t know what it is.” – Rosenblatt’s Law

When music consumption went digital, it became much easier to keep tabs on, but we also lost control of the ecosystem. Everyone slows down on the freeway to check out the car crash. The internet is an attention economy, so it interpreted this to mean we constantly want to be fed car crashes. 

“…artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough” – Daniel Ek

Telling artists to change how they create music to better fit Spotify’s recommendation algorithms means we’ve completely lost the script. We need to flip the narrative back around. If the Top 10 are all first-time artists’ “research records”, are we succeeding at A&R or failing at artist development? Or, as one major label A&R put it to me recently, if “12 year olds are breaking records overnight, why the f**k can’t we?”

Travis Rosenblatt is the founder of A&R platform Meddling. Over his decade in the music business, Rosenblatt has worked in some of the industry’s most influential A&R departments, where he learned, and subsequently built, precisely the discovery and communication tools they need to do their jobs efficiently.