Do Music Managers Trust Streaming Metrics?

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Arnt Maasø, who shifts our attention to the role of metrics in the music business. Datafication has grown in the music industry as well, with a strong turn to metrics in recent years. Where some decades ago the industry was run by self-taught entrepreneurs who were running their businesses predominantly by gut instinct, now music metrics are everywhere and directly influence decision-making.

Arnt’s project conducted surveys and interviews with professionals in the Norwegian music industry. Almost half of the survey respondents use music metrics in their jobs, but such use is distributed unevenly across industry roles; creators and artists engage with metrics far less than managerial roles, and larger businesses use metrics much more regularly than smaller operators.

Trust in these metrics remains somewhat limited, though. Views on data from collecting agencies and digital service providers are mixed – and the level of trust in data is also affected by whether such data are available in real time or with delay, and whether respondents believed that data are audited in-house by the metrics providers. Past data scandals and fraud have also affected such perceptions, of course.

Real-time metrics – as provided by Spotify and similar services – tend to build trust, while collection agency metrics – which often come only after a delay of several months – are seen as much less reliable and useful. Real-time data also enable users to test their accuracy: they can stream their own music a few times and see their metrics go up as they do so. This builds trust in the data.

Trust also appears to vary in line with companies’ size and resources. This is because large companies often have a better independent sense of the market, while the smaller stakeholders don’t have the resources to independently monitor the market and verify the metrics they receive from music streaming and other services. But even such smaller services appreciate their metrics access, in comparison with the pre-streaming, metrics-less times.

Many music managers also expressed trust that metrics are audited at the source, but often have no clear idea how such auditing may work; they only guess at how these processes work. This trust is affected by fraud cases and scandals relating to music metrics that are revealed from time to time. For instance, there have been reports about ‘fake’ artists and about Spotify click-farms, which exploit the royalty distribution models employed by leading streaming sites.

This means that data reliance is high and growing, but trust is still limited. Real-time metrics are especially important in building trust, and direct knowledge about metrics and metrics auditing also improves trust in the metrics. Such trust is also unevenly distributed across smaller and larger players in the industry.