👉 The Digital Tools Every Music Marketer Should Know About
We have an ultra insightful talk with Studioweby's Julien Mahin about the playlist-centric tools he built, about the data mining & the music scene and about the future of giants like Spotify
Fake streams, organic listeners, bots, playlist pitching, gating, algorithms, playlist curators that became some sort of Gods controling the digital music scene…. And inbetween all these, some spam messages with our all-time favourite Collab, bro? Does this sound familiar? Well, it’s the New World Order for the music industry, shaped by the gatekeepers that goes by the names of Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube a.s.o.
As overwhelming as it seems to be, luckily there are people smart enough to build the tools that address the needs rather than creating the need to address.
Based in Belgium, Studioweby is a software company focused on where our interest is: the digital music world. Their adventure started in 2013, with the bptoptracker.com project, strictly related to the Beatport Charts. This was followed in 2016 by spotontrack.com (a platform that tracks Spotify and Apple Music charts and playlists, from a song/artist perspective) , which became the most successful one. There are also 2 smaller project in their portfolio, an amazing search engine for playlists that accept submissions (by the way, all our subscribers receive a nice 10% discount code if they register for a PlaylistSearch.io account here - just use the soundfeed10 code at checkout) and an incredibly useful playlist analyzer.
Julien Mahin, the brain behind Studioweby, with a solid background in Computer Science and a genuine passion for music, was kind enough to chat with us about how the music industry relates now to data analisys, about the future of Spotify and many other interesting things.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Soundfeed Spotlight newsletter, to keep yourself up to date with the latest technologies and useful tips, all music related ✌️
How did you end up developing apps for the music industry?
This all started a long time ago. I have always been a music lover, especially electronic music. In 2013 I was spending hours every week looking at new releases and analyzing evolutions of the tracks in the Beatport Top, which was quite the reference in terms of electronic music. The problem I had is that Beatport only displayed the current version of the Top, but I wanted to also see the tops from the previous days, see if a track was going up or down, see the evolution. So I built a project for myself at first, recording the Beatport Top every day and displaying all this data on graphs and computed aggregated statistics etc. At the end of the day I put this online and it started to be used by many artists and labels too. This is how it all got started. Then I continued working on projects combining my two passions: music and website development.
Are A&R and label managers turning into data analysts nowadays? From your perspective, does the human factor count anymore in finding the next hit?
Data has become the most valuable asset nowadays, and I believe this is also true for the music industry. It’s key for every A&R to be able to read and understand data. Thankfully there exists a lot of tools to help you out, so you don’t have to really be a data analyst, but if you’re good at analyzing data, it will probably help you meeting your goals. Data can help you understand how a song became a hit, or just help you judge what worked and what didn’t.
The last few years the importance of data in artist discovery has also increased. It’s definitely true for labels looking to sign new talents. There are so many new songs released every day that we must use the technology to apply the first filters. If a software can select from the 40,000 songs released today on Spotify only 100 tracks that are worth listening, the label job becomes easier. I tend to believe the human factor still counts, music is art and we cannot just let computers completely decide what’s good and what’s not.
The artist/song discovery for fans has also evolved and is now very much impacted by data. How many Spotify users just hit play and let the algorithms decide what they listen to? How many users listen to their Release Radar, Discover Weekly or Daily Mix playlists?
We discovered Studioweby through the incredibly useful IsItAGoodPlaylist tool. Give us an idea of how many queries do you record per day. Do you have any plans in developing the project further on?
The initial goal was to build the magic formula to estimate the number of listeners of a playlist. We’re not there yet so yes, I plan to develop the project further. This is limited by the data publicly available so I am not sure I will be able to meet the initial goal but I still have a few ideas to develop in order to help analyze if a playlist is good or not, if it has listeners, if listeners are not bots. Every day that is around 200 playlist analyses that are processed through the website. But on top of that there are thousands of analyses run by our partners that integrated the analyses results in their own systems.
Spotify eliminated recently the Discovered On feature from the artist page, where people could find more playlists containing their favourite music. In your opinion, what reason is behind this decision?
That’s not a secret that Spotify does not like all the business going on around playlists placements. Removing the Discovered On information makes it more difficult for curators to prove that their playlists are worth it. So I believe this is a move to try to reduce all this shadow business going on.
As a listener and also as service provider deeply connected with the Spotify environment, where do you think Spotify is heading? Will we see some social features in the near future? Will we see an agressive take on the third party playlisters, at the same time pushing its own editorial playlists more in the front?
Since the beginning I have always hoped to see more social features on Spotify but it does not seem like it’s the way Spotify wants to take. What I think we really need is tools for artists to reach their fans on Spotify. If an artist I like releases a new song, I want to get a notification, I want Spotify to give the artist or label a way to show me new releases, other than the Release Radar playlist.
Regarding playlists I think Spotify will continue to push its editorial playlists and make it harder for third party curators to build successful playlists, mostly because it has become a business Spotify has no control on.
One last Spotify feature I am interested about and quite impatient to see if this will work well or not is the inclusion of music in the podcasts. I really like this idea to be able to create music podcasts that will pay royalties to artists.
SpotonTrack is a tool that lets you track Spotify / Apple Music playlists and charts and at the same time radio plays. Apart from the radio stats, what does it bring additionaly to the analytics tools offered for artists by Spotify and Apple Music?
The biggest problem with Spotify for Artists (that is also true for similar tools of other platforms) is that you only have access to data about your own songs. That’s one of the feature that is great on SpotonTrack: you have access to the data of millions of songs. You can then do comparisons between songs, analyze how a similar song has evolved, what are the key playlists to be in, …
We also offer much more reporting feature. With the dashboard and the Daily Digest email, the data you are interested in comes to you automatically every day. You don’t have to spend time digging data. Just open the daily email and in a few minutes you know all your new playlist additions and chart positions. Reporting possibilities are also interesting, as you can build PDF with your data, so that you can share it with your team for example.
Spotify grew up based on user, algorhitmic and editorial playlists. Is music curation an essential part for an artist image?
I don’t believe music curation is that important for all artists. Playlist curation takes a lot of time and it will be long before you get a return on the invested time. Artists have probably better things to do than that. Of course if this is what the artist likes, he should definitely go for it and fans will appreciate, but that does not seem mandatory to me to be successful.
Mybest.io automates the process of creating a playlist, using various filters, from BPM to acousticness. In your opinion, do algorithmic and computer generated playlist replace the human created ones?
Mybestof.io was an interesting project but unfortunately I decided to shut it down as I did not have enough time to dedicate to this project to make it evolve as I wanted. I strongly believe algorithms can help you build a better playlist, but we will always need at least a bit of manual curation process. Otherwise we will get stuck in the loop, algorithms will tend to always build the same kind of playlists. Just like for artist discovery we talked about earlier, algorithms can do a part of the job, but it’s good to keep a manual process at some point.
I hope to be able to work again on this project in the future and bring it back to life!
It’s clear that the music industry becomes more and more a data driven business. How do you see things evolve in the next years?
It’s difficult to imagine where we could be in a few years. Data is already more important than we can imagine, and will for sure be stronger in the future. I just hope DSP’s will make more data public so that we can build great tools to help artists and labels!
What will DSP’s like Spotify and Apple Music bring new in the future?
With all the investments done in Podcasts I am curious to see if something really big will happen around that.
Other than that I think DSP’s will focus on marketing tools for artists. If I remember well the licensing deal between Spotify and Universal mentioned that they would develop new marketing tools so I am impatient to see what comes out from this.
What are Studioweby’s plans for 2021?
That will be a very busy year! The roadmap for SpotonTrack is very challenging as there are so many new big features we want to add. More data sources should also be added this year.
Isitagoodplaylist.com should also get some enhancements during the year, mostly its companion project PlaylistSearch.io which is a search engine for playlists accepting submissions. But it’s not just a database of curators emails like we could find easily online, the quality is what matters for me! Each playlist has a full analysis based on a lot of data and I am also working on checking each one manually to give an estimation of the number of listeners.
Later this year I also plan to start a new project that will help artist and labels promote their new songs. That will be about the famous ‘presave’ feature but with a few additions to help increase conversions. And of course always with data in mind.
I told you, 2021 will be quite busy. Hopefully we can reach all the goals.