Music's 'Moneyball' Moment: Why Data is the New Talent Scout

An anonymous reader shares a report: A&R, or "artists and repertoire," are the people who look for new talent, convince that talent to sign to the record label and then nurture it: advising on songs, on producers, on how to go about the job of being a pop star. It's the R&D arm of the music industry. [...] What the music business doesn't like to shout about is how inefficient its R&D process is. The annual global spend on A&R is $2.8bn, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, and all that buys is the probability of failure: "Some labels estimate the ratio of commercial success to failure as 1 in 4; others consider the chances to be much lower -- less than 1 in 10," observes its 2017 report. Or as Mixmag magazine's columnist The Secret DJ put it: "Major labels call themselves a business but are insanely unprofitable, utterly uncertain, totally rudderless and completely ignorant." In the golden age of the music industry, none of that really mattered. So much money was flowing in that mistakes could be ignored. There was no way to hear most music other than to buy a record, and when CDs entered the market in the 1980s -- costing little to produce, but selling for a fortune -- the major labels were more or less printing their own money. But then came the internet: first file-sharing, then streaming slashed sales of physical music so deeply that the record business became a safety-first game. Every label executive has always wanted hits, but these days the people who run the big imprints want guaranteed hits. The rise of digital music brought with it a huge amount of data which, industry executives realized, could be turned to their advantage. In his first public speech as CEO of Sony, in May 2017, Rob Stringer asserted: "All our business units must now leverage data and analytics in innovative ways to dig deeper than ever for new talent. The modern day talent-spotter must have both an artistic ear and analytical eyes." Earlier this year, in the same week as Warner announced its acquisition of Sodatone, a company that has developed a tool for talent-spotting via data, another data company, Instrumental, secured $4.2m of funding. The industry appeared to have reached a tipping point -- what the website Music Ally called "A&R's data moment." Which is why, wherever the music industry's great and good gather, the word "moneyball" has become increasingly prevalent.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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