Spotify Announces “Spotify For Artists,” An Upgrade to Existing Fan Insights

When Spotify first introduced its Fan Insights initiative in beta in November 2015, it was, says VP of product Charlie Hellman, a dashboard of data intended as “a self-serve way [for] artists and their teams to really understand what was going on with their audiences on Spotify.” Now, a year and a half later, the streaming service is upgrading Fan Insights and rebranding the initiative as Spotify for Artists, complete with new features and controls that allow all artists to not only peek under the hood at their data through the service, but also manage their artist presence within Spotify itself.

As with Fan Insights, artists will have access to listeners’ demographic information — age, gender, location — as well as real-time song information, playlist performance and data and the different ways listeners are accessing or discovering their music. With Spotify for Artists, verified musicians will be able to now manage the way their artist page looks, with photos; pinned songs, albums or playlists that they want to promote atop their profile; and the ability to add and control which playlists appear on their artist page, whether created by themselves or by fans or other artists.

“What we’re seeing is that artists of all sizes need the help,” says Troy Carter, global head of creator services at Spotify. “Someone who is one of the top 50 artists in the world, they’re still trying to figure out a lot of things about their fans as it relates to specific demographics, how to reach them, how to sell more tickets, how to appeal to audiences that you may not necessarily appeal to on typical radio. But what we’re seeing as you go down the stream, artists who more typically self-serve, they also need more tools. We feel like Spotify for Artists is providing them.”

Spotify for Artists, more than a complete overhaul of the current iteration of Fan Insights, is the result of the past year-plus of feedback and updates to the existing system as artists and managers take the raw data and apply it to their careers. In announcing the new initiative today, Spotify pointed to British singer-songwriter Lucy Rose, whose demographic listener data led her to route a tour throughout Latin America; Canadian singer Joshua Hyslop, who used that same data to tour the Netherlands; New York City-based singer Max, who took location and listening data and used it to pitch his song “Lights Down Low” to national radio; and electronic musician Zhu, who rode the spikes of streams from a collaboration with Skrillex to 100 million listens while he averaged 4 million streams per month.

“There’s a lot of speculation that we’re going into the label business, and I think we couldn’t be further from it,” he says. “Our thing is, how do we support our partners on every end and allow them to use Spotify as a distribution platform, a place where they can reach more fans, and just be the most value-added partner that they’re gonna find.”

For more visit Billboard.com 



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