Apple Music Takes on Spotify With Analytics Tool for Artists

On Thursday Apple Music brought its free analytics tool, Apple Music for Artists, out of beta and officially into the world. The product, available to verified musicians and their reps, is available on desktop or iOS devices and uses Apple Music streaming data to give artists a picture of their global impact and industry milestones.

It’s metrics update daily, allowing users to see who is listening to their music and videos, how often, and where they’re listening from. Like similar tools on Spotify and other streaming services, the objective is to help artists tour and target their promotions in areas where they’re most popular — and to discover new areas where they might not have realized they were popular.

According to the announcement, the service “provides a level of detail beyond anything currently available including:

  • Access to all stream plays including algorithmic radio, as well as song and album sales from iTunes *something only Apple Music can provide
  • In-depth views of everything by song, album, playlist, location, fan demographics, and more
  • Visibility into which Apple Music or curator playlists are driving the most streams of their music, how those trends change over time, as well as the demographics of the fans they resonate the most with.
  • Insights into where their fans are growing and the ability to track streams and sales all the way down to the city level in over 100 countries. This makes it possible to easily plan tours, cater set lists for fans in each city, vary promotions by region, or uncover unknown areas of popularity around the world.

The product has also integrated Shazam data (including most Shazamed cities and countries) into the artist’s profile. Other highlights include the ability to view the average number of daily listeners by country, city or song; “Plays from Playlists,” with detailed information about the playlists an artists’ songs have been added to and where those songs are positioned in the playlists; and weekly data to cover music industry standard release weeks to enable artists to better monitor their week-to-week stats.

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