Can artists see playlists on Apple Music

Originally posted on LinkedIn August 12th, 2019

I will have a full review of Apple Music for Artists and where it stacks up in the world of artist services for independent musicians among major music streaming services. For now heres a quick take regarding their latest updates.

Whats still missing from Apple Music for Artists:

In the latest update to Apple Music for Artists, NONE of the following important artist marketing features were added for independent artists:

• Ability to add Artist Hero Image to artist profile page. Note, major label artists on Apple Music do have hero images.
• Ability to add artist biography
• Ability to display tour dates through a listing partner [e.g. SongKick, BandsInTown]
• Ability to create and display artist curated playlists
• Ability to display artist featured content
• Create artist driven merchandising offers
• Display artists full music catalog including music where said artist is a featured artist on another musicians song, or a remix producer for another artist

Note, Spotify for Artists has all these features minus one: Artist curated playlists on Spotify, these are actually user curated playlists, that are then displayed on the artist profile. But still this is a huge feature gap between Apple Music for Artists and Spotify for Artists. Its so disappointing because most independent musicians will find their audience splits 50% / 50% Apple / Spotify, so indie artists Apple Music fans get a reduced artist experience.

What is new: the Shazam stats e.g. how many people out there are asking to identify an independent artists songs. Thats super interesting, but you cant overlay the next data set you would need to make it powerful WHERE, specifically, in what location are these future fans asking to identify your music?

Yes Apple Music for Artists has location data, but it doesnt mesh the location data well with the Shazam data. You would have to do some digging on your own to figure out how the Shazam data corresponds to location. You can sort of do this via their filtering feature Apple lets you look at Shazam data in regional subsets, like Europe, Africa, North America. But thats regions not specific places.

In looking at my own Shazam data for my music group FSQ, I found I had some major spikes in Shazaming. But from where are the spikes coming?

On July 18th, July 22nd, and August 2nd I noticed FSQ hit over 10 Shazams on these days. Now right away, I think well maybe another DJ played our FSQ songs on these days and people in the club, or at a festival, or on the radio, etc, etc and a bunch of people went to go identify, e.g. Shazam, the song. Because FSQ is obscure enough of an artist, well, that 10 Shazams in a day seems like our music must have been played to a wider audience on that day.

Well the next set of data which specific songs of ours are being Shazamd showed me that it was probably specific songs from our catalog that were being identified. In fact, these two songs showed Shazam spikes over 300% this month

Now I can overlay these two songs Shazam profiles with my overall Shazam data to clearly indicate that is the case. Which again, is interesting, and cool

So on July 18th, it was our song Peel Back that people were Shazaming. On July 22nd and August 2nd, it was our song Zulu Congo Call that drove interest to have people Shazam us.

BUT I will have no way to figure out, where FSQ music was played on these dates. Was it at local festival? In a cool night club? Simply aligning the Shazam ID data to a region like Europe, wont help me drill down. Conversely, Spotify offers playback data by city which is extremely helpful. If the Shazam data aligned to a city, then I could go Google search etc and maybe get closer to understanding what event or what other DJ was in that town on that date, that could have been playing FSQ music.

Simply showing me that particular songs were Shazamed on a certain date to a higher extent maybe like 10 Shazams of specific song on a particular day well it says to me that yes, someone in a public setting played our music. But I will have no way of attributing the Shazams to a particular event that caused the rise.

Which also reminds me currently Spotify has attribution not only to specific cities, but to editorial and curatorial playlists. I can see where the bulk of my streams come from, down to specific playlists created by individuals. Apple Music also offers playlist attribution but I have not been able to utilize this feature because not a single Apple Music user, Apple Music playlist editor or Beats Radio DJ has yet to feature FSQ music. I wonder about the disparity in playlist additions of FSQ between Spotify and Apple Music because FSQ is added to many user and curatorial playlists on Spotify.

More data in Apple Music for Artists is cool, but without attribution I cant do much with that data to further our marketing efforts.

Spotify for Artists Playlist Stats attribute spins of particular songs to specific user playlists. FSQ is on many Spotify playlists, but not on Apple Music playlists.