Our Mission
To empower independent artists to access their own performance data, providing a democratized open source platform to consolidate and synthesize key metrics music labels evaluate as part of their A&R process.
Background
Music A&R is the division of a record label or music publishing company that is responsible for talent scouting and overseeing the artistic development (e.g. recording, marketing, promotions) of active artists and songwriters.
A&R executives heavily depend on their taste, gut feeling and experience to discover new talent. Starting in the late 2010s, the Music A&R industry became more data driven in order to:
- Help A&R scouts to make the right bets
- Minimize revenue loss
- Manage the massive volume of records and artists
In order to keep their competitive advantage, record labels are extremely careful about how much they publicize regarding the data mining and predictive modeling methods they are utilizing.
This has transformed the relationship between record labels, artists, and managers. Up-and-coming artists now face new challenges of understanding how each label is evaluating their potential and spending more time packaging their entire portfolio/social media presence.
Impact of Empowered A&R:
Approach
Empowered A&R uses publicly available digital service provider data to provide artists with the insights they need to compete for record label deals and track their virality index, at no cost to them.
- All
- Data
- Infrastructure
- Predictive Model
- Current Dashboard
- Future Dashboard
- Next Steps
Testimonials and Feedback
The voice of our users matters to us! To continue improving Empowered A&R, we have collected feedback and reviews from several music artists. We'd love to hear more so please send us an email with your experience on using Empowered A&R.
It would be a huge time saver to have everything in one place and presentable. It’s hard to manually track even spotify.
It’s hard to know how our peers are doing outside of their top 10 spotify tracks and even that takes a long time figure out. This would be helpful to quickly see how we stack up to bands we consider our peers.
We’ve never tried to send stats to a label. We’ve sent in our social media handles and let them assess. It would be great to try to have more control over the narrative.
It’s helpful to know how spotify defines similar artists, compared to what I would think I am similar to.
It would be cool if you could see insights on the demographics of the people listening to your music.
It would be helpful if you could include the label that artists are currently signed to. We have to google around for that, and it would be awesome to be able to quickly look that up.
We are nowhere near making a top50 playlist. We’ve been a background track for an episode in a TV show and that’s our broadest exposure. What would this look like for smaller artists?
Our Team
We're a group of UC Berkeley MIDS students who are passionate about data and music!
Dom Dillingham
Maria DiMedio
Parker Williams
Alice Ye
F.A.Q
Top questions asked during product development and user testing.
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Who are the customers for Empowered A&R?
Empowered A&R's main users are artists looking to understand their engagement across social media and digital streaming platforms (DSP) in order to better navigate the A&R process. Empowered A&R is still in development and we're launching new products everyday! For our minimal viable product, the product experience is catered to independent hip hop and rap artists in the US market who are targeting their Spotify and Twitter growth. As development new features and capabilities, the product experience will improve for artists of other genres (e.g. electronic, pop, country, etc.) and expand to include artists performance more social media and DSP.
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What social media and digital streaming platforms are available on Empowered A&R right now?
Spotify and Twitter are currently available. In the future, we plan to incorporate Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit.
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What is virality?
Virality is the rapid circulation of a song by a large number of people. Spotify quantifies virality by tracking user activity interacting with that song, such as number of playlist additions, shares, saves, streams, and period-over-period change.
Contact Us
Reach out to use if you have questions or feedback!
Email:
empowered.artists.rep@email.com