Tools & Resources

Stats For Artists: How To Analyze Popularity?

In today's world, up-to-date information is crucial for everyone, and especially for music artists. If you want to connect with your potential fans, find new marketing opportunities, places to play gigs, or just to see how popular you are, you need advanced statistic tools. Here's a few that could be useful for all artists.

First, check out www.buzzdeck.com. The buzzdeck is a statistics tool coming from one of the world's best known digital music distribution services - AWAL, and its Basic version comes free for all AWAL distribution clients. It can be used by artists, managers, labels and brands. It's designed to analyze not only the buzz from the websites and social media sites, but also song plays and sales, P2P traffic and other important factors.

The service offers many great features: an interactive timeline which shows all daily statistics, which is fully customizable and shows important relations, e.g. between social media activity and music sales. Other helpful features include a heatmap that shows fans' activities in different regions, advanced demographics tools and a customizable live feed from sources like Twitter, MySpace, Google Search etc. It also automatically imports events from Last.fm, Songkick and MySpace.

Right around the corner is Musicmetric (www.musicmetric.com) - another tool that lets you track the buzz around your band(s) by relentless data mining and crawling hundreds of thousands of pages to comprehensively inform you about current trends, fans' sentiments and opportunities. It comes in three packages: the basic Essential, the somewhat expanded Professional and the full hands-on Enterprise version. And you can try it for free for 10 days, so go on and check it out!

The next (probably) big thing is appropriately called Next Big Sound (www.nextbigsound.com). Praised by Billboard and TechCrunch, this site is where it's at for acts who want to have all the important data in one place. They have the basic Stats and Charts functionalities, which measure more traditional aspects like song plays, comments on social media services etc., but the revolutionary feature they have is the Premier, which monitors conventional Internet traffic as well as anything from sales data through social media to radio plays and P2P activity.

RockDex (www.rockdex.com) is the ultimate social media tracking tool. It scans the most popular social media services and blogs to give you advanced stats like your most influential fans, stats for individual songs and overall opinions and exposure. And then delivers it to you in smart, comprehensive way in a form of tailored reports.

Another app - not custom-tailored for the music industry, but also useful - is SproutSocial (www.sproutsocial.com), which is the one-stop place for all your potential customers. The app tracks the buzz that people create about you on the net and helps you target the people with the biggest potential to become your fans. It also stores all your contacts and helps you manage your Twitter account, and has a free trial period of 30 days.

These are just a few ideas how to understand and use the plethora of stats to grant your band the insight it needs to succeed!



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