Being in Tune with Your Audience
What we can learn from the music industry’s relationship with audience insight
I started my entertainment industry career at Domino Records in the early ‘00s. It was an exciting and intense experience (for anyone who knows that label's history, you will understand why). But as the millennium's first decade ended, I left to work in book publishing. And, unknown to me then, it was around then that the music industry started to look at audience data - just as I have been.
I left the music industry just as streaming launched. I’d experienced the golden years of iTunes and file-sharing platforms like Audiogalaxy. Alexis from Hot Chip, who managed our web store then, returned from New York with an iPod, the first I’d ever seen. It was a period of leaks, panic, powerless phone calls, and massive sales. One record I worked on outsold Robbie Williams that year with just a team of four on it (and I won the music industry equivalent of a Nibbie). But then, just as I was getting out, something seismic happened, and streaming came in. We all know how that went. Not great for most, but fantastic for others - especially labels with catalogues who suddenly saw the long tail trends much more common in publishing. Alongside that, though, something else was happening—the rise of social media and a proliferation of data. As artists and managers tried to find their new place in the world, this data gave them an idea of what was happening within these new hyperconnected and often interconnected fanbases. And as profits (at least temporarily) thinned out, there was a need to be focused on how the moves they made might or might not connect with current fanbases or, even better, new ones.
So, you can see why I might have been more than a little intrigued by Miles Leonard’s talk for AudienceCon a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been using data (as well as more traditional consumer insight research) and seeing how it might inform publishing decisions and campaign plans for a while. TBH, I’ve found it hard to imagine exactly how it works in music. This was like a light bulb going off for me. Genuinely.
This is how Miles was described on the schedule:
Miles Leonard - Token||Traxx. Previously Chairman of Parlophone & Warner Bros. Records UK. Ex. Virgin Records, EMI Records, Roadrunner Records and credited as signing and breaking artists including Gorillaz, Coldplay, Tinie Tempah, The Verve, Lily Allen, Paul Weller, Stereophonics and for reviving the career of Kylie Minogue.
He spoke about the proliferation of data. Their Amazon is Spotify, which gives you plays and regions, but from what he said (I think) little else. Instead, the music industry builds a picture from some first-party data where they own it (ticketing, newsletters, owned social) but, like I’ve been doing in publishing, they look at social media for insights - not just via theirs or their artists own accounts but broader social data. For them, Twitter data is really helpful (less so for publishing, I would argue) and they use social listening tools that analyse conversations (hashtags, tweets) or ones that look at audience affinities - either to the artist, other similar artists or the genre as a whole. In publishing, it’s been the latter approach that I’ve been most excited by. For us, it’s a little more complicated to get the data we need because many of our communities exist on social platforms that are less easy to get at than Twitter. But when we access the relevant platforms we can see a lot more detailed information. We can know that within an audience we have fans who connect around the author and genre but are also massively into an adjacent genre, author, hobby, topic, influencer, media, festival, brand, cuisine or even ingredient. Really powerful stuff.
So, what does the music industry do with the data they can get? They use it to find out more about their artist’s audience or potential audiences. If you’re managing the artist beyond the recording contract - this could be everything from where they play next and what they play live in Germany vs Australia, for example, to what merch they should make, or what interests they have that are shared by their audience and so on and on. I’m making up some examples here, but maybe a dance remix or a move into another genre or audience would be a good or bad idea. Maybe the artist should partner with this brand or not. Perhaps the demographic for this festival is entirely wrong, or maybe there’s another one they didn’t realise was necessary for the large part of their fanbase. There’s the gut, but there’s also information. And he talked about the music and how he saw the relationship between creativity and data.
Miles spoke a lot about artist relations and how this work was relevant and helpful for some artists, but for others, it wasn’t. He mentioned Nick Cave as an excellent example of an artist for whom this work would be an anathema. I feel the same about so many bands and authors I love. They connect instinctively with what they do. And they set the agenda for the art they create. I really can’t imagine at Domino we would have had any such conversations with Bonnie Prince Billy (or anyone on the roster to be honest).
What I loved about how Miles spoke about this work was the complete disregard for music snobbery. The audience continually asked how the pull between the commercial and the art affected artists' creativity. I’m not sure that’s a new dilemma - in any creative endeavour. But I liked his reply - he said he looked for cultural relevancy. That was what was important, not popularity. Some “artists” have that anyway - their art speaks to that. But it can apply to a big pop song or a pure piece of art. That was what he looked for.
He also spoke about how this work wasn’t new to the Music Industry either. Back in the day, when Simon Cowell saw a hugely commercial audience in Robson & Jerome’s viewers of Soldier, Soldier and thought about how to launch them, he wanted to choose a cover for them to sing that was backed by data (of sorts). So, what did he do? He went to the Jukebox company that supplied the social and working men’s club. He asked them which was the top-performing record. Bingo. Data. He spoke about when it can go wrong. Don’t mistake the love of a song or sound as always indicative of the love of an artist. Fandom (as we see with TikTok in publishing) can be more complex than just size. And he gave a great example where a single sold but the album did not – because, ultimately, no one loved the band.
And he spoke about cultural relevancy and timing. Sometimes the timing isn’t right, but it might be later. I see this all the time in publishing. Marie Kondo’s book came out before I joined Ebury but hit the zeitgeist two years later. The same can be said for the proliferation of new-age books that resurfaced in recent years as that trend returned.
I found this talk massively energising. So why?
There are some significant differences between the music and book publishing industry and their audiences - having worked in both, I’m well aware of that. In the book industry, we don’t (by and large) own any first-party data in the same way that the music industry does, and to be honest, the consumer relationships are so different (I could write an essay on that alone) that it takes quite a lot of work to get it. Fundamentally our audiences behave differently because they have a different relationship with what is, after all, an entirely different medium with its own unique lifecycle(s).
But we often try to ask the same questions and similarly have that pull/push of creativity vs data. We are also looking for cultural relevancy - books that connect and resonate with an audience. We don’t have such big social accounts, and certainly not for every author. But we have many book-loving fans on social media who identify their interests, favourite genres, and numerous other preferences publicly. Miles didn’t talk about campaign work, his focus was on A&R, but you can see how this information also maps there. A consumer might over-index as a fan of x but also y artist. They might also love this blog, radio station, and magazine. You start to build a list of opportunities.
When I present a piece of research, I often talk about how I’m giving teams information. It’s more information than you had before - you or the author and their team need to understand when it’s relevant and when it isn’t. And that means this work needs to go hand in hand with experience, the experience to make those calls. There is no “computer says yes” or “no”. Many publishers keep insight work siloed. We need experts in this work, but we need people who understand the business and where this can help, to get big wins from it.
A lot of publishers are trying to get to some of the basic end of this info from influencer tools where they can see some of the rudimentary preferences of audiences following an author account - and I often train teams on that. These tools are handy for topline info on campaigns and acquisitions conversations and are non-technical. They’re great for quick, everyday wins. Occasionally teams will use social listening tools which can be handy to some extent - but are limited by what people say - they don’t analyse audience behaviours online and often some really key social platforms that book-buyers connect with are entirely missing. Or at the other end teams often try to use survey data companies. These can give answers to bigger consumer trends or behavioural questions and media consumption etc. but can’t handle detailed audience data to relate back to the book-buying communities we work with.
I recommend and use all of these for the right use cases - but, to get to this detailed audience research and answer those juicier questions, as they say - you’re going to need a bigger boat. It’s a little more complicated for us in publishing - as it requires crunching new and much bigger data sets, using entirely different tools and often extracting at least some data manually to rework it. It’s not just a case of buying some shiny new tools or bringing people from outside of the industry in. To do it well you need to have enough understanding of data and insight methodologies to know what is and isn’t relevant statistically. More than that you need to know where some of this fits into publishing so you have genuinely useful insights. This is where I’m working a lot at the moment.
To sum up, audience insights can help you make informed decisions. The unfiltered likes, interests, thoughts, and posts of audiences that cluster around a genre, author or topic can help you move quickly to make informed decisions about your campaign or publishing strategy. There’s a lot to learn from the music industry - but in my mind, the different methodologies that we can start to develop will see equal if not more powerful returns than theirs.
To find out more about what I do, drop me a line to get closer to your audience.