Spotify creates 100 billion new data points every day.
A detailed web of likes, follows, playlists, and listening activity.
They know your music taste. Your favourite song. What mood you’re in.
They even know what you’re doing (that “driving” playlist is a giveaway).
So, why don't artists get to see it?
Despite billions of these data points, artists get very little insight into their audience.
Spotify and other music platforms only display a small amount of the information: a monthly snapshot of streaming numbers and a vague breakdown of location and demographic data.
Platforms can erase this data
On top of this, Spotify and other platforms can remove this data at any moment.
In fact, they did.
As Dan Fowler wrote in his recent essay on fan data, in August 2023, Spotify removed access to historical data (more than two years old). Any information about your catalog history is gone, unless you downloaded the data in time.
Takeaway: you should be able to see the granular details of your audience and identify your biggest fans.
Or you can lose access...
During 2015-2020 I released dozens of songs and remixes on Soundcloud, racking up tens of millions of plays, thousands of followers and interactions.
I can't access it any more.
It's my own fault - I lost access to the email and password, but all those relationships are now gone. I've got no way to get in touch with those fans. And if I want to release music again, I'll have to start again with a new audience.
It’s not just music platforms…
The same thing is true on social media.
Artists spend years building their fan base on Instagram and TikTok to promote their music, but they have little-no visibility into their following.
If you lose your credentials or the platform revokes your access, then everything you built is gone. And what happens when another platform grows popular and you have to rebuild your audience again from scratch?
Takeaway: you should be able to take your audience with you, outside the platform.
Platforms use your audience to monetize
All these platforms are farming your activity and your audience to serve targeted adverts and build their business.
Meanwhile, they hide most of the data from you, and share vanishingly little revenue with creators.
That data belongs to you
Fan relationships are the most valuable thing artists have. This relationship should exist without platforms holding the most valuable data captive.
If you truly owned your audience (and all the data), you could unlock so much more:
Identity your biggest fans.
Reward them and connect with them personally.
Aggregate their activity across streaming, social, merch and ticket purchases.
Plan campaigns with more accuracy.
Plan tours with more accuracy.
Monetize better by hyper-targeting your most engaged audience.
And take that data with you from one platform to another.
Look what happens when you go deep into fan data…
To give this a concrete example, let's take a look at two different types of listener.
Fan 1: “This person streamed your album seven times in full, commented on every social post, and bought merch.”
This indicates a strong fan relationship. This is someone who will likely buy tickets to a show, join a community and value a personal interaction with you in some way.
Fan 2: “This person streamed your single 70 times as part of a playlist.”
This is probably someone who played your music as background noise while they’re at work or driving. They like your music, but they’re not a ride-or-die fan.
Streaming services display these two people as equal, but more data — aggregated across different platforms — reveals which is more valuable.
It’s important for fans, too
There’s a reason we wear band t-shirts, put posters on our bedroom wall, keep ticket stubs and wristbands.
Our musical identity is often deeply related to our personal identity.
In the past, it was easy to express our music identity because consumption was linked to physical products: CDs, vinyl and physical tickets we could display in our bedrooms.
Now all consumption is digital.
We need a new way to express our musical identity online.
This is why so many people share their Spotify Wrapped every year — we want to tell the world who we are through our listening habits.
What if we could do this all year round, with data points across streaming and social activity, and present it in a public way online?
It needs to be open
All of this is possible. The data points exist, but they are gate-kept on corporate servers.
Countless projects have tried to unlock them through APIs, only to have their access cut off.
The only way to do this, is to rebuild on a fully open base layer.
From the ground up.
Blockchains are more than just markets...
Most of the narrative around music and crypto so far has been based around sales and markets.
For good reason. Blockchains do enable a free market for music and direct payments which are so desperately needed.
However, this tech opens up more than just markets.
It's also the free flow of data, social graphs and audiences. Every interaction can be recorded on an open, composable database.
Now imagine a world where all music apps — streaming, collecting, ticketing, social apps — can interact with each other. We could aggregate all this hive of activity to reveal true fandoms.
This will take years (decades, probably), but there are already dozens of music apps onchain that act as a starting point.
I've personally collected hundreds of songs from dozens of musicians and interacted with them in different ways onchain. I've collected on Sound, given them a "cosign" on Catalog, replied to posts on Lens or Farcaster, owned a token, joined a gated Telegram chat.
If someone can aggregate this data it would give me a musical identity I could showcase in digital spaces.
Unlocking all this fan data might not be as headline-grabbing as million-dollar sales but it's equally important (maybe even more so).
That's why I signed the Oscillator Manifesto and I'm excited to see what can be built on this open layer.
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