Our journey with Graphext has revolutionized how we interpret data, transforming it into a strategic asset. This synergy enables us to not just understand the present landscape but to anticipate the future techniques of music marketing, ensuring our artists stay ahead in this dynamic era. (Antonio Rescigno)
About Idol
IDOL has the bold mission to help independent artists develop their careers in the long term with freedom and autonomy. They have been supporting artists and labels worldwide with their digital distribution since 2006; providing personalized support and international development, assisting clients with global strategies and local market penetration.
IDOL and their platform, Labelcamp, allows for efficient catalog management, audience analysis, and financial tracking. IDOL provides targeted pitch strategies for track placements and a network of global partners for comprehensive project support. They also specialize in digital strategies and marketing campaigns for enhanced online and offline presence.
The challenge
With the complete range of services provided by IDOL to artists in multiple countries and in different stages of maturity, their Audience Development team takes into consideration several variables in order to strategize and implement the most promising campaigns, marketing strategies or operation improvements. The team possesses extensive industry-specific expertise; however, their potential to make informed business decisions based on data was hindered by the lack of appropriate tools to analyze their actions. In this context, the team had already built a complete Notion database with over 160 variables and thousands of campaigns. Notion allowed them to store any type of variable, from numbers, categories, and countries, to images.
However, as the amount of data scaled, finding patterns became challenging, costly, and time-consuming. This was frustrating, as all the efforts to build and maintain the database were not completely capitalized in the competitive advantage of knowing what would likely succeed.
With the goal of maximizing value for the artist, they turned to technology to address this scaling challenge. This is when Graphext entered the picture.
The solution
The IDOL team experimented with various tools , only to find that the absence of native integration led to complications. Moreover, their trials revealed that other options were either overly simplistic or lagged in speed relative to their requirements.
Graphext provides the IDOL team with an accessible yet sophisticated analytics platform. It offers seamless access to hidden insights within their data, facilitating the discovery of intricate patterns, budget monitoring, campaign clustering, and a spectrum of other advanced functionalities. All these tools are intuitively integrated into a user-friendly interface, that allows Idol to do the following:
- Data Importation from Notion: With a seamless native integration.
- Data Exploration and Analysis: Find correlations, patterns, and trends
- Data Visualization: Support for most types of plots, powered by smart recommendations, through interactive visual displays.
- Collaboration: Allows team collaboration by sharing projects, data, and insights securely.
- Export and Integration: Supports exporting plots and model results, integrating with other tools or platforms (such as Notion)
Some actionable business insights
The Audience Development team at IDOL concentrates on three primary types of analysis.
1. Time and Effort Analysis:
This analysis helps the team understand the allocation of their time and efforts in supporting artists. Utilizing tools like Graphext and Notion, the team can identify which genres and styles are prioritized in key territories. For example, the analysis reveals that Hip Hop is a major focus in France, whereas the UK and US emphasize indie/alternative genres.
Similarly, the Audience Development Team can easily see if they are focusing on developing more partnerships or digital marketing depending on the country and see how this ratio develops over time for each platform.
Our team's efforts are centered around two key types of tasks to promote our music albums. The first involves direct investment in the album's visibility for marketing purposes. This strategy aims to enhance the album's presence in the market. The second type focuses on gaining recognition and investment from Digital Service Providers (DSPs) like Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer and Pandora but also Youtube, META and TikTok. Achieving support from these platforms signifies our credibility and potential in the market.
It's crucial to understand the impact of these strategies in different territories, especially in regions where we have established more partnerships. By evaluating our progress in each territory, we can measure our success in terms of market recognition and credibility. This assessment helps us refine our promotional efforts and tailor them to specific market dynamics.
The above chart delves deeper by comparing the number of actions the team took (Ads and Partnerships combined) by month per DSP.
This is interesting for the team to monitor if the evolution of demands and activity per DSP, which DSP is taking up most of the team’s time, and in turn evaluate if the ROI on this DSP makes the time worth it.
It is an overview of the platforms that are drawing the most attention in the industry, and that offer the most possible actions/opportunities for artists.
For example, this graph, in particular, showcases the drastic increase in focus on TikTok actions in the second part of 2023, due to a huge demand from artists to be pitched for partnerships, and for ads to be run on their posts.
2. Campaign Performance prediction:
The team also evaluates the effectiveness of different campaign strategies in each territory to establish best practices and predict results. This includes examining the correlation between advertising formats and campaign success.
The audience team tries here to understand how much it costs to have somebody listen to the song that is advertised, aiming for the lowest cost possible.
The graph below shows the cost per stream over the amount spent for Spotify Marquee placements depending on the format of the release (Album, EP or Single).
These types of analyses are crucial in guiding the Audience Development team’s strategies, enabling them to predict results on their efforts.
3 - Macro-Analysis across ad formats and platforms to establish averages
Finally, the team keeps track of the performance of different actions, and tries to establish averages per territory in order to gauge whether a specific campaign has been successful or not, as the exact outcome is not clear at the micro level.
Graphext allows them to easily compute a large amount of results, and display them in different graphic formats, to highlight trends, progressions and performance averages across platforms, team members and territories.
Average intent rates on Spotify campaigns run by the team by territory. The intent rate indicates how many people interacted (liked or added a song to a playlist); the graph above shows that the countries with the highest percentages of interactions come from the Netherlands, Mexico and Italy.
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