Pariah Carey Part Four: New Frontiers and the Science of Music Discoverability
Sometimes the algos need to be investigated and changed, but how does a musician do that?
Catch up on the Pariah Carey series: Part One , Part Two and Part Three
Across four parts, Pariah Carey – whose etymology you can find here – covers the recent music marketing data bootcamp co-hosted by Water & Music Academy and Music Tomorrow. The month-long series featured eight nutrient-dense sessions on music data, filled with case studies and actionable frameworks to guide folks through the terrifying gauntlet of the digital marketing lifecycle.
Rather than simply recap the bootcamp, though, I’m putting those sessions’ wisdom to the test, and offering up my own nascent music journey as the crash test dummy. The hope is that my experience can be useful for others looking to take their first steps.
In part one, I reviewed data practices and benchmark setting. Then I built a foundation, creating my artist story and developing ‘SMART’ (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound) goals (I’m tracking them here) for sharing that story and building community.
In part two, I recapped approaches to developing a marketing plan and managing community relationships. I also explored tools and insights to help structure my content framework (which I’ve made publicly viewable here).
In part three, I overviewed marketing automation tools and the mysteries of algorithmic recommendation systems. And today, I’m sharing insights from the final two sessions, which covered digital discoverability and “new digital frontiers” – like the metaverse and web3 – en route to closing out our to-do list:
Understand your story
Set goals
Choose the tools (and content pillars) that help you tell that story
Build a content strategy – across music and social – to achieve those goals
Observe how people respond to your content
Track and adapt
SESSIONS SEVEN AND EIGHT: How to boost digital discoverability + Closing remarks: New digital frontiers
Discoverability isn’t a game of chance, or even talent, really. As an artist, it’s tempting to think someone will eventually wander by and say “here you finally are,” but that’s not likely to happen.
“There’s so much music out there,” said Dmitry Pastukhov, a product owner at Music Tomorrow. “Recommenders are no longer just a nice feature, it’s a must-have tool that listeners engage with to discover the music that you like.”
Recommenders, broadly, are the algorithms that govern our music platforms. It’s not an artist-friendly system, but I’ll leave that alone for now (read The Beat if you’re interested in regular tirades on how we can do better). Today, it’s the system we have, so companies like Music Tomorrow – a knowledge hub for data-driven music professionals – form to help artists and their champions use data to transcend the noise.
Gene Avery Hogsett
The goal is “getting people to know that [an artist] exists,” said Gene Avery Hogsett, head of digital marketing and advertising at Handwritten Records. And with so much music, that process involves clever push-and-pull of the system’s levers.
Working alongside Pastukhov, Avery Hogsett employed Music Tomorrow to elevate Bishop Ivy, an emerging musician on Handwritten’s roster. The artist wasn’t generating much algorithmic traffic, so his team wanted to root out any underlying issues before releasing his then-upcoming album, IRIS.
A Music Tomorrow “snapshot” – an analysis of Bishop Ivy’s Spotify profile – revealed a disconnect between the artist’s identity and the way the algorithm understood his music. In short, the algorithms were mischaracterizing his sound and recommending it to the wrong audience – ‘wrong’ in this case meaning people outside of Bishop Ivy’s genre.
So, they needed to “educate audiences with the right patterns,” said Julie Knibbe, Music Tomorrow’s founder and one of the bootcamp’s core operators. That involved finding artists and genres that matched Ivy’s tenor, capturing those artists’ audiences and then targeting them – aka the “right people” – across social platforms.
“When running ads [to promote an artist on socials], you need the right people to listen,” Hogsett said. “If I get clicks for a penny, that’d be great, but you only get .004 cents on one play, so [the model] is already upside-down.”
Streaming’s paltry rates and social platforms’ ‘pay-to-play’ structure make it imperative that promotional dollars are optimized. Because all of these platforms are siloed, and because we have “very little insight” into what’s happening behind the platforms’ proverbial veil, attribution and community building require a lot of confounding guesswork.
And that’s the game, really – to “simplify the variables we can’t control and bring them into as much context as possible,” said guest speaker Chuka Chase, a co-founder of automated marketing platform SymphonyOS. “Context is the biggest key: where, who, what – the basics.”
Chuka Chase
For Bishop Ivy, context meant building a landing page populated by a Spotify playlist, one that placed his new music amongst those matching artists. When navigating to the landing page, then, would-be fans would listen to Ivy and those artists together. In time, the algorithm would learn to associate them together, too – to “generate those positive signals from the right audience,” Pastukhov said.
And it worked. With his new EP, Bishop Ivy’s percentage of algorithmic traffic increased from 10 percent to nearly half, and most of it came from the Discover Weekly playlist, which Pastukhov described as an algorithmic version of a friend recommendation – it comes with a lot of “algorithmic proof.”
From 35,000 feet, this all must sound pretty ridiculous – that artists are condemned to schemes and rigmarole to have any shot at all. But that’s the reality. And with strategies like this, as tedious as they may be, “you take control of how people are discovering you,” Knibbe said. Added Pastukhov, succinctly, “It all boils down to the level of control.”
Control is an elusive lever for artists and their champions, and its pursuit is a point of disruption in emerging tech. In the final session, Water & Music’s Founder Cherie Hu asked her guest speakers to what extent emerging tech augments existing marketing strategies versus disrupting them entirely.
“I think it’s both – one of the biggest challenges [in emerging tech] is around the measurement of success,” said Tina Rubin, chief commercial and partnerships officer at Wave, a startup that hosts interactive virtual concerts. “A lot of it is coming up with new metrics.”
Creating new metrics means ascribing meaning and importance to emerging behavior, and then quantifying its value. Before there’s precedent, though, or even sustained evidence of that behavior, it’s tough to calculate impact.
Tina Rubin
“What I love about emerging tech is we don’t really know how it’s going to impact,” said guest speaker Robin Shaw, co-founder and chief marketing officer of iiNDYVERSE.
“Thinking about how [emerging tech] works in music has been really difficult. How can we use web3 technology to better the music experience and claw back some value that was lost?” Shaw said. “How do we create that value? Does it lie in the music itself, or in everything around the music?”
iiNDYVERSE focuses on democratizing access to web3- and metaverse-powered engagement tools so they can become part of an artist’s arsenal.
Shaw overviewed a case study with the artist Bat for Lashes, who returned to music – and a much different looking promotional landscape – after a multi-year hiatus. The team focused on using socials and email – previously central audience-building tools – as top of funnel instead, (more on the marketing funnel in Pariah Carey part one) using them to drive fans toward a more intimate WhatsApp chat.
“People fall into a trap with the marketing mix when socials are very much controlled by the algorithm,” Shaw said. Once again, it’s about control and simplifying the variables that are outside of it. He referenced the October Meta incident, for instance, when an algorithm mistakenly inserted the word ‘terrorist’ on the profiles of some Palestinians. “You want to move away from those mediums,” he said, “and email itself has become a very saturated space.”
People are moving from digital native to gamer native, Shaw theorized, citing a study that said roughly 70 percent of both Gen-Z and Millennials spent money on games in the past year. In his view, it’s becoming important to introduce a gamified element to whatever interaction you’re promoting.
iiNDYVERSE set up “gamified flows” where fans could scan a QR code or send a message to access the WhatsApp chat – a process that increased click-thru and conversion rates by several orders of magnitude.
Bringing people closer is a strategy that “concentrates on revenue,” he said, which is important. “It’s a weird social construct that just because you’re part of the arts and you enjoy your work you shouldn’t get paid for what you do – that’s bollocks.”
He concluded by posing a question that artists should be asking: “How is this going to benefit me commercially so I can continue to make music, continue to do more interesting things for my fans?”
Recentering money is a slippery proposition – and a necessary one. Artists have grown accustomed to earning virtually nothing from the consumption of their music and that should change. On the other hand, web3 overcorrected by financializing music, throwing it atop the asset pile for degens. There’s a happy medium here somewhere, but as an artist, where and how you fight your battle really comes down to you.
“Take time to think about what you actually want to achieve,” said bootcamp co-operator Maarten Walraven in closing remarks. “And don’t be driven by outside forces.”
In other words, stay wise to the incentives of the platforms you use, and to the metrics they tell you are important, because as Walraven said “they may not be your metrics.” Maybe your success exists outside the tumult of these games, and maybe you’re one of the ones realizing that the game only works if we play it, too.
As for me, I’m going to play the game because it’s the best current option for getting my music to people with whom it might resonate. Hopefully there are better options in the future. And meanwhile, I hope that within Pariah Carey, there’s both a foundation and loose guardrails for your own journey.
Once again, I’d rather not play this game alone – that’s why I’m sharing this process transparently. If you’d like to follow along, get involved or just clue me in on what I'm missing or doing poorly, you can reach me here. I’d welcome feedback and collaboration.
Until next time, here's to you Mariah 🥂
lead image: Robin Shaw