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How the music industry uses big data to create the next big hit

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Editors note: We've updated our list of top 5 music apps in China. Check here to see what the landscape looks like in 2017.
KuGou, TTPOD ( reportedly required by Alibaba Group), QQ Music (of Tencent), Kuwo, Duomi (backed by Chinese digital music company A8) and Baidu Music were the top six music apps in China that had a combined market share of about 80% as of the second quarter of 2014, according to the latest report on China's mobile music app market released by CNIT-Research, a Chinese mobile market research firm.

Apart from Duomi which was born as a mobile music app (It now has PC-based online music streaming site too.), the other five started from PC-end as a digital music player, music downloader, or streaming service. When it comes to the mobile end, almost all of them offer music streaming and download services.

Though the research results on China's mobile music streaming/download apps by Sootoo Institute, a research division under Chinese online tech media Sootoo.com, show that Kuwo has a larger market share than QQ Music, the top six are the same names.

The top six and many other Chinese music streaming/download mobile apps offer basic steaming service for free while charge for premium subscriptions which include higher-quality files, downloads, among others.

Different from the top six streaming/download apps, the seventh-ranked in the CNIT-Research report, Changba, is a mobile Karaoke app. Online singing has proved a profitable business and several Chinese services have grown to be big companies on PC end - YY and Tiange have gone public with this business model. Changba, now the biggest player of this kind on mobile, have begun monetize its user base through their monetization approaches, virtual item sales and premium subscriptions.

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China's Top 5 Music Apps Have a Combined Market Share of 80% · TechNode

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Editors note: We've updated our list of top 5 music apps in China. Check here to see what the landscape looks like in 2017. KuGou, TTPOD (reportedly required by Alibaba Group), QQ Music (of Tencent), Kuwo, Duomi (backed by Chinese digital music company A8) and Baidu Music were the top six music apps in China that had a combined ...

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Some might imagine that Chinese customers would rather pirate songs than pay for them. However, anti-piracy moves by the government seem to have paid off. Beyond that, China has become a fertile market for music and content streaming. It's raking in the profits, and internet giant Tencent is leading the way.

Tencent as digital music advocate

The Great Firewall and the language barrier are forcing the Chinese to consume local content through Chinese language channels. That's an opportunity for internet giants like Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu to become content gatekeepers.

Out of the three giants, Tencent has the largest music streaming business with over 77 percent of the market. Tencent's music inventory has more than 17 million songs.

It owns the three biggest music streaming services in China: QQ Music, Kugou, and Kuwo. All of them operate independently and serve different demographics.

"The users in QQ Music tend to be living in the first-tier cities in China, whereas for Kugou and Kuwo, the users actually live in the second and third-tier cities," said Tencent Music Entertainment Group head Andy Ng at a music conference.

The internet giant takes piracy seriously, promising to take down pirate content within an hour, he adds.

Tencent's streaming business has seen blistering growth. According to Ng, the number of premium subscribers has increased from five million in 2015 to 15 million today. Tencent expects to hit 25 million premium subscribers by 2019.

Chinese users will continue to pay

Ng's predictions may come true. Half of Chinese netizens surveyed have paid or are willing to pay for content. It's no surprise that QQ Music is profitable while Spotify continues to bleed money.

A proliferation of lower-end smartphones from brands like Xiaomi, Oppo, and Huawei means consumers are spoilt for choice when it comes to cheap phones to access internet services. On Sina Mobile, the cheapest Xiaomi costs about US$74, while the most expensive costs US$587 - still about US$300 less than an iPhone.

QQ Music's cheapest option is less than a US dollar per month. The low price works in China - capturing a small percent of the 83 million who live alone could generate substantial revenues for streaming businesses.

With an abundance of cheap phones and streaming packages, content streaming becomes a pastime for many young, lonely, working-class adults set adrift by work migration and singlehood. Many don't seem to have a long-term partner. This may be a knock-on effect of China's old one-child policy, with men now substantially outnumbering women in the country. About a third of them are aged 15 to 34 and are more likely to pay for music services.

It's a cure for loneliness, says Jia Wei, vice president of social media app Momo Inc. Music and related content are one of the many entertainment options as they have dinner alone.

Future possibilities in streaming

While the growth of the Chinese music market is healthy, there are further areas of growth.

Music availability, especially Kpop, affects where Chinese super fans choose to stream or buy their music.

"I used Xiami because Xiami bought SM Entertainment's stock. (SM Entertainment is a top entertainment company in South Korea.) They owned the unique copyright of songs," April Lin, a postgraduate student from Shanghai and ex-Kpop fan says.

Alibaba owns four percent of SM Entertainment and also has an exclusive distribution deal. Alibaba-owned Xiami is Tencent's competitor.

Chinese fan clubs are powerful for the Korean music industry. Over on QQ Music, some fans bought a Kpop-turned-Chinese-pop-singer's album more than a hundred times to get a digital badge. The album cost US$0.75 per copy.

To boost Tencent's song inventory, music distributor K-Digital Media (KDM) announced a deal with the Chinese company for 10 million songs during the World IT Show 2017, an ICT conference held in Seoul. World IT Show provides a platform for Asian tech companies to find Korean content and technologies to generate business opportunities.

The deal was coordinated by the Korea Association for ICT Promotion (KAIT)'s Global ICT Partnership Program, which matches Korean startups and companies with foreign partners in the IT industry.

KDM owns over 12 million songs, 10,000 movies and music videos, as well as Kpop production capabilities including 2000 composers and producers. QQ Music, Kugou, and Kuwo listeners will have a lot more content to look forward to.

Social ecosystem

Tencent's bet on Korean content makes sense given its dominance via WeChat. The Korean music industry has successfully merged with social sharing, which entrenches users as loyal customers.

Korean musicians win awards by ranking high in physical album sales, digital charts, broadcast top lists, Youtube views, and netizen votes. Social media, such as Weibo and Twitter, are means to canvas support and build camaraderie with fans.

Through social media, Chinese admirers can amass their power to buy multiple albums or stream music 24/7 via paid accounts on foreign music sites.

Melding music with social means that more music-related opportunities become lucrative: live streams, TV shows in various formats, advertisements, and up-close-and-personal events. It's an ecosystem that keeps on giving.

Already, sites like QQ Music offer paid members concert tickets, exclusive content, and events.

If Tencent acquires more Korean songs and content, their hold over the Chinese music market will continue.
This is part of the coverage of the World IT Show 2017.

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Why China's music streaming is leading the world

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Some might imagine that Chinese customers would rather pirate songs than pay for them. However, anti-piracy moves by the government seem to have paid off. Beyond that, China has become a fertile market for music and content streaming. It's raking in the profits, and internet giant Tencent is leading the way.

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QuestMobile - QuestMobile: 2017 China Music Apps Report

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In terms of the number of apps, Tencent holds obvious advantage, as it has QQ music, Kugou Music and Kuwo Music. For most users, one music app can basically satisfy their need, but since no app can cover all copyrighted music, about 15% of or 80 million users would like to use more than one apps.

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On a scorching night in August, thousands of Chinese youngsters filled a grand stadium in Nanjing to celebrate the four-year anniversary of the Chinese boyband TFBoys. Those who couldn't attend - 118 million of them - spent a no less memorable night by watching the shows aired over the internet. Screams became a waterfall of real-time comments, called rolling across the live video. Regrets over not making it in person materialized into 340 million units of virtual gifts sent through the live streams, all of which were run by Tencent that night: QQ Zone, QQ Video, QQ Music, WeSing, Kuwo, KuGou, and KuGou Live.

None of these products, except KuGou Live, were designed specifically to live stream. That's the point. A user of the social network QQ Zone, for example, wouldn't have to switch over to KuGou Live to watch her idol TFBoys. Tencent - the Chinese tech giant that has revolutionized how people communicate, pay for, and play video games - is now ready to redefine the ways music is consumed.

To start with, Tencent has been able to dominate almost the entire market. Last July, its flagship music streamer QQ Music merged with competitor China Music Corporation (CMC) to form Tencent Music and Entertainment Group (TME). Together, Kuwo and KuGou - formerly owned by CMC - and QQ Music, control a whopping 75% market share, according to a report by the Data Center of China internet (DCCI).
Top music streaming apps in China 2016-2017 (Data source: DCCI; graph by TechNode)
That dominance alone, however, doesn't equal a lucrative business. For decades, Chinese people have gotten used to getting music for free in a piracy-unhampered country. "Our number of monthly active users accessing music is actually over 600 million, which means, at 15 million [paying subscribers], our conversion to subscription is still less than 3%, " says Vice President of TME Andy Ng in an interview with International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). He adds that in more mature markets, the percentage is around 20-30%.

But Ng is optimistic: "We see a huge opportunity and potential for growth." The numbers are no doubt promising. In 2016, recorded music revenue in China grew 20.3 percent driven by a 30.6 percent growth in streaming alone, according to IFPI. And the music giant is already finding ways to lure Chinese people into paying something that used to be so easily free.

Unmatched copyright control

While licensing fees can easily eat up the bulk of revenues, Tencent knows that in the long run, the investment will pay off. In May, TME signed with Universal Music Group (UMG), the last one of the "Big Three" record labels to strike an exclusive licensing deal with the Chinese music giant. With the added roster of major Chinese labels through the CMC merger, Tencent's streaming rights in China is unrivaled.

The music giant also sub-licenses this content to competitors. One of them is NetEase Cloud Music, the music subsidiary of Nasdaq-listed NetEase Inc. Over the past two years, QQ Music and NetEase Cloud Music have been aggressively suing each other over copyright infringement, hoping to snag users once certain music became exclusive on their own platform.

The copyright bloodbath is happening against a backdrop of China's tightened regulation over online music. In July 2015, the government finally stepped up to order all internet music providers to delete their pirated content. Samuel Chou, CEO of Sony Music Entertainment China and Taiwan, went as far as calling 2016 " the first year of a new era for music in China ".

Beyond music streaming

Adding more legal gunpowder, however, is not enough. "Music was considered a free commodity in China for so long that it will take time to change people's perception," reckons Simon Robson, President of Warner Music Asia. "We're talking about a situation where about 90% of the market was piracy."

To help smooth the transition, Tencent charges little. QQ Music has a three-tier monthly fee at RMB 8 and 12, and 15 ($1.22/$1.83/$2.18). In comparison, Spotify Premium is priced at $9.99 a month. But this is nothing new to Chinese users, who have long been beneficiaries of the constant price wars between internet companies heavily subsidized by investors. The bike-rental battle is a sobering example. Kuwo, KuGou, and NetEase Cloud Music all offer similar price points as QQ Music.
Tencent's ecosystem of apps that were used to stream TFBoys' concert (Poster image: TFBoys; graph by TechNode)
Just as Tencent's WeChat goes beyond a messaging app to permeate every aspect of the Chinese service economy, TME is building an ecosystem of value-added services around music streaming to make music pay. Basic tactics include perks for premium users like concert tickets, professional sound quality, and game credits-a luxury from having a parent company with a global dominance in online gaming.

QQ Music also tested out what it's called the "digital album". When the platform released a high-profile album, it will take the album out of the streaming pool and offer it for a one-off fee. After two to three months, QQ Music will then migrate the album back to its streaming service.

The model has seen some initial success. When the original soundtrack of Fast and Furious 8 came out on QQ Music, it sold over one million digital copies within a week. "[Chinese young people] are happy to spend a few dollars supporting the artists they truly admire," said Ng to IFPI. According to the DCCI, over 90 percent of QQ Music's users were born after 1990.
TFBoys concert live streamed via QQ Music (Screenshot taken from the QQ Music app)
Lastly, Tencent has looked beyond the audio and tapped into arguably the hottest buzzword swirling around the Chinese internet circle since 2016: video live streaming. A recent report by iResearch puts the market at an estimated RMB 20.8 billion (around US$ 3 billion). Audiences fixated on their screens toss virtual gifts over the virtual stage to their idols-be they established star under the spotlight or farmers toiling in the potato field from a small town. The online fervor for TFBoys proves that there is still room for Tencent in the crowded space.

Tencent certainly hasn't overlooked Chinese people's obsession with karaoke. WeSing, an app that lets users sing karaoke on the phone and share the recorded work with friends and strangers, has surged to become the biggest player in the vertical totaling 460 million users (in Chinese). When the live streaming wave hit, WeSing naturally bolted the function onto the platform, and virtual gifting has, in 2016, gained popularity on the app as highlighted in Tencent's annual report.

Turning a profit

With an array of business models surrounding music streaming, TME is already giving revenue boost to its parent company. In 2016, Tencent's social networks revenues increased by 54 percent to around $4 billion (though still dwarfed by the its $10 billion gaming revenues). That increase mainly reflects growth in digital content services, which include Tencent's music business and virtual item sales. According to someone familiar with the matter, a significant amount of TME's live streaming revenues came from KuGou Live, in which Tencent has a controlling stake via the CMC merger.
Cover photo: Yahoo Finance
QQ Music is also, amazingly, profitable. Over in the west, Spotify has yet to reach profitability despite having 20 million paying customers. Like Spotify, the biggest source of revenues for the Chinese music app are monthly subscriptions followed by advertising (in Chinese). As TME is on course for IPO at a $10 billion valuation, the world will be listen closely to how it makes its numbers sing.

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How Tencent's empire is making music pay | RADII China

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On a scorching night in August, thousands of Chinese youngsters filled a grand stadium in Nanjing to celebrate the four-year anniversary of the Chinese boyband TFBoys. Those who couldn't attend - 118 million of them - spent a no less memorable night by watching the shows aired over the internet.

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Fifteen years ago, Steve Jobs introduced the iPod. Since then, most music fans have understood this has radically changed how they listen to music.

Less understood are the ways that raw information - accumulated via downloads, apps and online searches - is influencing not only what songs are marketed and sold, but which songs become hits.

Decisions about how to market and sell music, to some extent, still hinge upon subjective assumptions about what sounds good to an executive, or which artists might be easier to market. Increasingly, however, businesses are turning to big data and the analytics that can help turn this information into actions.

Big data is a term that reflects the amount of information people generate - and it's a lot. Some estimate that today, humans generate more information in one minute than in every moment from the earliest historical record through 2000.

Unsurprisingly, harnessing this data has shaped the music industry in radical new ways.

When it was all about the charts

In the 20th century, decisions about how to market and sell music were based upon assumptions about who would buy it or how they would hear it.

At times, purely subjective assumptions would guide major decisions. Some producers, like Phil Spector and Don Kirshner, earned reputations for their " golden ears" - their ability to intuit what people would want to listen to before they heard it. (If you aren't aware of the SNL parody of this phenomenon, take a second to see " More Cowbell.") Eventually, record companies incorporated more market-based objective information through focus groups, along with sheet music and record sales.

But the gold standard of information in the music industry became the "charts," which track the comparative success of one recording against others.

Music charts have typically combined two pieces of information: what people are listening to (radio, jukeboxes and, today, streaming) and what records they're buying.

Charts like the Billboard Hot 100 measure the exposure of a recording. If a song is in the first position on a list of pop songs, the presumption is that it's the most popular - the most-played song on the radio, or the most-purchased in record stores. In the 1920s through the 1950s, when record charts began to appear in Billboard, they were compiled from sales information provided by select shops where records were sold. The number of times a recording played on the radio began to be incorporated into the charts in the 1950s.

Klaus Hiltscher/flickr

While charts attempt to be objective, they don't always capture musical tastes and listening habits. For example, in the 1950s, artists started appearing on multiple charts presumed to be distinct. When Chuck Berry made a recording of " Maybellene" that simultaneously appeared in the country and western, rhythm and blues, and pop charts, it upended certain assumptions that undergirded the music industry - specifically, that the marketplace was as segregated as the United States. Simply put, the industry assumed that pop and country were Caucasian, while R&B was African-American. Recordings like "Maybellene" and other "crossover" hits signaled that subjective tastes weren't being accurately measured.

In the 1990s, chart information incorporated better data, with charts automatically being tracked via scans at record stores. Once sales data began to be accumulated across all stores using Nielsen Soundscan, some larger assumptions about what people were listening to were challenged. The best-selling recordings in the early 1990s were often country and hip-hop records, even though America's radio stations during the 1980s had tended to privilege classic rock.

Record charts are constantly evolving. Billboard magazine has the longest-running series of charts evaluating different genres and styles of music, and so it makes a good standard for comparison. Yet new technology has made this system a bit problematic. For example, data generated from Pandora weren't added to the Billboard charts until January of this year.

The end of genre?

Today, companies are trying to make decisions relying on as few assumptions as possible. Whereas in the past, the industry relied primarily on sales and how often a songs were played on the radio, they can now see what specific songs people are listening to, where they are hearing it and how they are consuming it.

On a daily basis, people generate 2.5 exabytes of data, which is the equivalent to 250,000 times all of the books in the Library of Congress. Obviously, not all of this data is useful to the music industry. But analytical software can utilize some of it to help the music industry understand the market.

The Musical Genome, the algorithm behind Pandora, sifts through 450 pieces of information about the sound of a recording. For example, a song might feature the drums as being one of the loudest components of the sound, compared to other features of the recording. That measurement is a piece of data that can be incorporated into the larger model. Pandora uses these data to help listeners find music that is similar in sound to what they have enjoyed in the past.

This approach upends the 20th-century assumptions of genre. For example, a genre such as classic rock can become monolithic and exclusionary. Subjective decisions about what is and isn't "rock" have historically been sexist and racist.

With Pandora, the sound of a recording becomes much more influential. Genre is only one of 450 pieces of information that's being used to classify a song, so if it sounds like 75 percent of rock songs, then it likely counts as rock.

Meanwhile, Shazam began as an idea that turned sound into data. The smartphone app takes an acoustic fingerprint of song's sound to reveal the artist, song title and album title of the recording. When a user holds his phone toward a speaker playing a recording, he quickly learns what he is hearing.

The listening habits of Shazam's 120 million active users can be viewed in real time, by geographic location. The music industry now can learn how many people, when they heard a particular song, wanted to know the name of the singer and artist. It gives real-time data that can shape decisions about how - and to whom - songs are marketed, using the preferences of the listeners. Derek Thompson, a journalist who has examined data's affects on the music industry, has suggested that Shazam has shifted the power of deciding hits from the industry to the wisdom of a crowd.

The idea of converting a recording's sound into data has also led to a different way of interpreting this information.

If we know the "sound" of past hits - the interaction between melody, rhythm, harmony, timbre and lyrics - is it possible to predict what the next big hit will be? Companies like Music Intelligence Solutions, Inc., with its software Uplaya, will compare a new recording to older recordings to predict success. The University of Antwerp in Belgium conducted a study on dance songs to create a model that had a 70 percent likelihood of predicting a hit.

Of course, YouTube might tend to cluster songs by genre in its search algorithm, but it's increasingly clear that the paradigms that have defined genres are less applicable now than ever before.

What happens next?

Even as new information becomes available, old models still help us organize that information. Billboard Magazine now has a Social 50 chart which tracks the artists most actively mentioned on the world's leading social media sites.

In a way, social media can be thought of as analogous to the small musical scenes of the 20th century, like New York City's CBGB or Seattle's Sub Pop scene. In Facebook groups or on Twitter lists, some dedicated and like-minded fans are talking about the music they enjoy - and record companies want to listen. They're able to follow how the "next big thing" is being voraciously discussed within a growing and devoted circle of fans.

Streaming music services are increasingly focused upon how social media is intertwined with the listening experience. The Social 50 chart is derived from information gathered by the company Next Big Sound, which is now owned by Pandora. In 2015, Spotify acquired the music analytics firm The Echo Nest, while Apple Music acquired Semetric .

Songwriters and distributors now know - more than ever - how people listen to music and which sounds they seem to prefer.

But did people like OMI's 2015 hit " Cheerleader" because of its sound and its buzz on social media - as Next Big Sound predicted? Or did it spread on these networks only because it possessed many of the traits of a successful record?

Does taste even matter? You'd like to think you listen to what you enjoy, not what the industry predicts you'll like based on data. But is your taste your own? Or will the feedback loop - where what you've enjoyed in the past shapes what you hear today - change what you'll like in the future?

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How data is transforming the music industry

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Fifteen years ago, Steve Jobs introduced the iPod. Since then, most music fans have understood this has radically changed how they listen to music. Less understood are the ways that raw information - accumulated via downloads, apps and online searches - is influencing not only what songs are marketed and sold, but which songs become hits.

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There's absolutely nothing that is untouched by Big Data. And it's no surprise that even the music industry has become one its "victims".

The problem in the music industry

Not long ago, there was a strong belief that the internet was killing the music industry. For years now, the industry has failed to keep up with the rapid pace of technological advancement. This clearly meant that consumers turned to illegal downloading for the sake of convenience as well as pricing.

Current solutions that the music industry came up with, such as Apple's iTunes, enjoyed some success. But they were always hampered by device compatibility and digital rights management issues.

Then came streaming. Streaming finally offered a solution with the potential to overcome the chief draw of illegal downloading -which was that the videos could be consumed for free - as well as convenience, since services offered by YouTube were free and tunes could be streamed on any device.

And music and technology became allies, yet again.

When Big Data came along

Big Data and Analytics played a major role in this modern-day romance.

From recommendation engines to choosing the perfect individual playlist and IoT-enabled pop concerts, data is redefining the dynamics of the music industry and the relationship between music and its listeners, in more creative ways than ever.

A decade ago, the music industry barely had any understanding of their audience, who was buying their LPs, CDs, or cassettes. With downloading services taking over, these companies found ways to track the listening habits of users and making recommendations, the same way that Amazon does for books.

However, with the latest streaming model, the floodgates stand wide open. Companies have access to detailed information such as when, how, where, and who is listening to what.

The aim of the industry, now, is to use these customer behaviour insights together with knowledge of the music itself, which is made possible only with Big Data. The raw music that is produced is essentially like unstructured data. In the digital era, this raw music can be easily digitized and analyzed.

The music industry predicting the future

The music industry lays great emphasis on predicting the future. This happens at all levels of granularity - from deciding what the individual user of a streaming service wants next on their playlist, to discovering the next Gangnam Style. It has recently been shown that Big Data has the ability to do just that.

Researchers at the University of Antwerp were able to create an algorithm to predict the position that the dance records would chart at in the Billboard Dance Singles chart. This was fairly accurate.

Of late, the Internet of Things has also found its footing in pop music. This year, attendees at the Taylor Swift concert were given LED bracelets controlled with RFID technology that changes colour and pulse in tune with the music.

With a large chunk of the music industry's revenue coming from live music performances, we can expect increasingly creative ways of creating new experiences for live audiences.

Pandora Media

Since 1999, the Musical Genome Project, developed by Pandora Media, has been using the process of structuring music data with the help of manual classification as well as automated algorithms. There are up to 450 data points that are collected with every song in the database, which currently stands at around 30 million.

These parameters include the instruments that are in use, the gender of the vocalist, the style of the back-up vocals, and the tempo of the rhythm. Each of these tracks is studied by specially trained musicians, similar to the way that Netflix employs people to watch and classify their content.

Due to this structuring of unstructured data that comes from raw music, the tracks can be compared to each other and judgements can be made, algorithmically, about what the user would like to listen to next.

Spotify

Spotify, a commercial music streaming service, was launched in 2008. It currently has over 24 million registered active users, of which 6 million are paying users. With over 20 million songs online, 20,000 new ones are added to its database every day.

Users all over the world have created over 1 billion playlists and over $500 million has been paid out to right holders since the launch of this database. This makes it abundantly clear that without Big Data, Spotify would cease to exist.

Spotify positions itself as a data driven company, which means that data is made use of in all the aspects of the organization. And there are numbers to prove this -

1. Users at Spotify create 600 GB of data per day and 150 GB of data per day via different services.
2. 4TB of data are generated daily in Hadoop - a 700 node cluster that runs over 2,000 jobs per day.
3. Spread across 4 data centres across the world, the company has 28 PB of storage.

The company has also developed an open source workflow manager called Luigi. Luigi is a python framework for data definition and execution. The manager is also used to crunch tons of data. Most of this data is, however, user centric. For instance, the billions of log messages which allow the database to provide music recommendations or select the next song on the radio.

This data is also used in decision making and providing forecasting information and business analytics.
Spotify also uses this data in various other forms. For example, in 2013, the database used streaming data to predict the winner of the Grammys. They made this possible by breaking down the user's listening habit by taking into account the song and the album that was being streamed to determine the popularity of the music. By the end of this experiment, 4 out of 6 of their predictions turned out to be right.

Spotify would not have turned out the way it did without Big Data.

With a growing presence in many countries and a rapidly growing listener base, there will be a lot more data created in the coming years.

With more data comes better predictions, better recommendations, and more users, which results in better payouts to those with the rights.

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Big Data has become such an essential part of our lives that all our technology will cease to exist without it. Name any industry - fashion, music, technology, food, marketing, business- and we find that Big Data has made its mark there.

The demand for skilled Big Data specialists has never been higher. If you are a part of this enticing industry, or wish to become a part of it, up your game with a certification. Take up a course in Big Data.
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Predicting the Next Big Hit - Big Data and the Music Industry

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There's absolutely nothing that is untouched by Big Data. And it's no surprise that even the music industry has become one its "victims". Not long ago, there was a strong belief that the internet was killing the music industry. For years now, the industry has failed to keep up with the rapid pace of technological advancement.

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The music industry has needed a face-lift for a long time. Luckily, the advent of big data might provide musicians with a more successful revenue model. This represents one of the biggest industry shifts that music has seen in decades. Let's explore the possibilities big data currently offers the long-suffering music industry.

A New Revenue Model

The entire revenue model of the music industry has changed in the last decade. Although streaming sites like Spotify helped curb online piracy, the music industry hasn't yet clearly defined the royalty rates for streaming music.

Big data might change that, because it helps bring artists and corporations together more effectively via high speed data analysis such as a Hadoop cluster. Data from streaming sites provide companies fantastic insights into the genres and styles their target demographic currently likes.

Although there's a long-raging debate about "selling out", it's starting to look like a big data-backed strategy might be the last refuge to get musicians paid.

The Failure of Subscription Services

YouTube recently unveiled their long-awaited subscription music service. It's a move designed to improve what some describe as their "absolute advertising overkill". Analysts are critical of this move--it certainly didn't work for Pandora or Spotify (not to name dozens of other services).

Marketing Possibilities

Big data analysis is revolutionizing the way businesses choose to connect with their target demographics, and soon, the music industry will likely follow suit.

By utilizing new ad technologies and social media platforms, the music industry may figure out how to get a bigger digital advertising sector they can leverage into exciting new collaborative marketing with big brands. Among those already on board are Nike, Urban Outfitters, and Red Bull.

This means that musicians and record companies may adopt the type of revenue-sharing model utilized by social networks like Instagram.

Instagram's popularity as a marketing tool has exploded in the last few years. Currently, it's considered one of the highest-engagement platforms. Through tastefully-chosen advertising, artists are getting to share their work and brands get to promote awareness. The music industry might follow in their footsteps--and big data could play an important role in the switch.

It may not be long before music videos and even entire albums are sponsored by corporations.

How Big Data Can Change Music

Big data provides information about listener motivation--why do they listen to a specific artist? This helps the industry spot trends faster, and provides accurate data about a demographic's unique " musical dna".

It will also provide the industry with better fan engagement strategies, made possible by relationships between innovative artists and brands. This could solve many current industry issues with music distribution.

Perhaps most importantly, streaming music via a big data catalog may solve the problem of artist compensation. Many are pushing to get artists paid by their number of "plays", similar to pay-per-click advertisements.

The music industry now accepts that many people won't pay for music. Big data advances might facilitate an important change, taking pressure off of consumers to fix the music industry's outdated revenue models. After all, songs are data.

Over time, a gigantic "store" might be created out of this massive collection of data.

Artists will be able to opt into data revenue sharing--providing more control of the direction of their art.

Will Musicians Go Along?

There's a lot of stigma about " selling out". However, many savvy artists realize that, like other tradespeople, they need to collaborate with businesses to accomplish big goals. The big data solution is right in front of the music industry, and for once, it seems like the music industry might be ready to make some much-needed changes.

Big data can improve monetizing strategies, marketing, and the seemingly bygone notion of artists making a sustainable living from their music. Above all, big data may improve music's primary function: bringing people together.

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How Big Data is Changing the Music Industry

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The music industry has needed a face-lift for a long time. Luckily, the advent of big data might provide musicians with a more successful revenue model. This represents one of the biggest industry shifts that music has seen in decades. Let's explore the possibilities big data currently offers the long-suffering music industry.

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Apple's old slogan was "Think Different" - and while it is now retired, and the ethos may not be as apparent in the company's products as it once was, it is true for their approach to Big Data.

While Apple traditionally employed teams of highly paid experts in aesthetics and design to produce systems that they thought people would want to use, competitors like Google examined user data to see how people actually were using them.

This gave those competitors an edge with the everyday apps that made smart phones so popular - maps, navigation, voice recognition and other aspects of computing that we want to do on the move.

As well as positioning itself as an "enabler" of Big Data in other people's lives, it has also been put to use in its own internal systems. Apple has often been secretive about the processes behind its traditionally greatest strength - product design. However it is known that Big Data also plays a part here. Data is collected about how, when and where its products - Smart phones, tablets, computers and now watches - are used, to determine what new features should be added, or how the way they are operated can be tweaked to provide the most comfortable and logical user experience.

The Siri voice recognition features of iDevices have proved popular with users too, and this is also powered by Big Data. Voice data captured by the machine is uploaded to its cloud analytics platforms, which compare them alongside millions of other user-entered commands to help it become better at recognizing speech patterns (machine learning) and more accurately match users to the data they are seeking. Apple keeps this data for two years - disassociated from your real identity and assigned with a unique anonymous indicator, as a concession to ensuring privacy.

Like its biggest competitors, Apple also offers cloud-based storage, computing and productivity solutions, for both consumer and business use. Last month it was reported that it had purchased FoundationDB , a popular proprietary database architecture widely used for Big Data applications. It is thought that this could be used to bring increased analytical prowess across its suite of online services such as iCloud, Apple Productivity Works (formerly iWork) and its upcoming streaming music service.

I hope you found this post interesting. I am always keen to hear your views on the topic and invite you to comment with any thoughts you might have.
About : Bernard Marr is a globally recognized expert in analytics and big data. He helps companies manage, measure, analyze and improve performance using data. His new book is: Big Data: Using Smart Big Data, Analytics and Metrics To Make Better Decisions and Improve Performance Y ou can read a free sample chapter Additional Reading
Follow us on Twitter: @DataScienceCtrl | @AnalyticBridge

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How Apple Uses Big Data To Drive Success

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Apple's old slogan was "Think Different" - and while it is now retired, and the ethos may not be as apparent in the company's products as it once was, it is true for their approach to Big Data.