The other key for each analytics company is the patented formula it uses to compile statistical reports on rising artists and songs. Musicmetric and Next Big Sound present some of their findings in public charts - the latter partners with Billboard to create the Social 50, a measurement of the most active artists on social media, and the Next Big Sound 15, an indicator of artists predicted to go viral based on their current online acceleration - but The Echo Nest keeps its “hotttnesss” rating system hidden, and only paying clients can access each service’s full suite of crunched numbers. And for good reason: the number crunching produces remarkably accurate predictions of success. For instance, Next Big Sound’s 2015 midyear report showcased how the company’s ability to track YouTube uploads of songs allowed it to predict, last January, that Halsey’s fame would grow exponentially and that Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” and OMI’s “Cheerleader” would dominate the summer airwaves. “We’ve been tracking this activity since 2009 online, so we have a lot of patterns for every artist that’s broken in those six years,” said White, “and we can see where they were at this stage in their career and what their trajectory looks like compared to everybody else.” It seems obvious for music industry professionals and brand partners to consult music analytics regularly, but it also behooves independent artists to use these services as a way to determine where and how their fans are best engaging with their material. In the future, White said, Next Big Sound hopes to convert its data directly into actionable items for delivery to its users instead of merely presenting numbers and leaving the interpretation up to clients. AN OLD DOG’S NEW TRICK: MUSIC XRAY Meanwhile, Mike McCready hasn’t lost hope in analyzing songs themselves. He reconfigured his Hit Song Science to form Music Xray, of
which he is the CEO, in 2009. Rather than directing hit predictions at labels and A&R personnel, Music Xray focuses on the artists themselves. For $10, they can put a song through the company’s diagnostics, which combines feedback from five industry professionals and twenty music fans with a patented algorithm to determine the likelihood that the song will be selected for one of the plethora of label opportunities, brand partnerships, or sync deals offered on Music Xray. “The only purpose of diagnostics is so that upon that first transaction, upon that song coming into our system, we can gather enough information about it to know whether it’s a needle or a strand of hay,” said McCready. “And we can show that information back to the artists.” Doing so ensures that most of the songs submitted to opportunities on Music Xray will be of high quality - with submissions costing an average of $16 and the company’s prediction model based on the assumption that songs are submitted to twenty opportunities, artists whose songs receive low scores will likely leave the site - and thereby turns the service into what McCready describes as an “industry filter,” a place for unsigned talent with high potential to break free of the Internet noise. Hit Song Science’s original comparison of acoustic properties still has a place on Music Xray in a sort of recommendations role; for example, if a music supervisor uploads “Crazy Train” as a reference track, any artist with a similar sounding track on Music Xray is notified. More interestingly, after six years at the company’s helm and well over a decade in music analytics, McCready is confident enough in his predictions that Music Xray has
MUSIC BUSINESS
A&R department, a management firm, or a corporate brand, the better chance they have of discovering an independent artist who is blowing up on one particular platform.
begun offering to front the submission fees for high-potential songs in exchange for 20% of the resulting deal. When asked why high-potential artists would give up 20% of a deal they were likely to land anyways, McCready pointed to the investment strategy as a way to finally awaken skeptical musicians to the power of song analysis and prove that Music Xray isn’t just out to nickel-and-dime musicians; once that happens, the company will shift its investments to the industry professionals who bring these artists to market. And McCready is certain it will happen; he likens the music industry’s apprehension to that of mainstream baseball during the advent of “moneyball,” which displaced the same “gut instinct” and artistic “fussiness” that still dominates much of A&R. It will likely take a string of chart-topping successes uncovered by Music Xray to convince the world at large that analytics should be applied to music itself. Until then, the field’s role in the music industry will be “confined” to collecting and analyzing those trillion data points. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Zach Blumenfeld is a freelance music journalist from Chicago. He will vigorously defend his city’s music scene against any coastal detractors, though that’s probably just his Midwestern inferiority complex acting up. He’s an alumnus of Vanderbilt University, where he hosted a live performance/interview radio show for three years, and now he spends his nights reviewing concerts for Chicago publication Gapers Block. You can follow him on Twitter @zachblumy. PERFORMER MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2016 31