How Indie Labels Are Using Data and Analytics

The music industry has data spilling out of its earholes in 2013: Likes, tweets, plays, views, followers, subscribers… There is more data available on how people are discovering, listening to and sharing music than ever before. But the real challenge is making sense of it.At AIM’s Music Connected conference in London today, a panel drawn from the independent music community talked about their experiences. The panel comprised Sammy Andrews of Cooking Vinyl, Ben Rimmer of Believe Digital and Grant Bussinger of Warp Records. The moderator was Million Media’s Neil Cartwright.

“Did you know, 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years? And the amount of data in the world doubles every 18 months,” said Cartwright, as an introduction.

“Every minute we create 204 million emails. There are two million Google searches per minute. 48 hours of YouTube video uploaded every minute… Why does all this matter? There are going to be enormous opportunities: enormous job opportunities, enormous growth opportunities for companies who can get that data and use it properly. It’s going to affect all of us, not just in music, but in our daily life.”

The panel were asked to define Big Data. “It’s exactly what it says on the tin. It’s large amounts of information,” said Andrews. ”We have access to more of it than ever before, and advanced software and analytics to process it and make decisions based on it.”