Imagine you are driving around running errands and a song comes on your Spotify that you have never heard before. You instantly like it and are glad that you just happened to hear it that morning. Have you ever thought about how you just happened to hear a song that you really enjoyed? Yeah, it's not by chance, it's Big Data.
Let's start with the basics. For those who may not know, Big Data is incredibly large data sets that can be analyzed to reveal trends, patterns, solutions, or associations.
So, what does this mean in regard to your Spotify and within the music industry? How you interact inside your music streaming apps has potential to become data.
In the past, decades before digital streaming, the music charts were mainly based on of how often a song was played on a radio, or how many records were sold. While on a surface level this method makes sense, what it did not capture was listening habits and musical tastes of different demographics and psychographic target markets.
Throughout the years, chart information did get better. For example, they started to incorporate a scan system data that would show what albums were being sold in various locations. But still, something was lacking.
Fast forward to present day and we have an explosion of data from streaming services. The industry now has the capability to see specific songs from albums that users are most frequently listening to, how they are listening (via computers, mobile devices, cars, etc.), where they are listening, how often songs, or artists, are mentioned on social media, and more. With that, artists can pull what cities they should hit on their text tour or the demographics of their audience, just to name a couple.
Daily, people generate about 2.5 Exabyte's of data, which is the equivalent to 250,000 times all of the books in the Library of Congress (Khoso, Northeastern University). Not all this data can be used while analyzing the music industry, but it can still help better understand their market.
How does all this affect what you listen to? Artists consider this data to help the chances of their next song becoming a big hit.
Music recording experts, composers, and lyric writers use these metrics to develop algorithms and with that, create catchy, popular music. They study interactions between rhythm, melody, harmony, and lyrics to predict what will top the charts.
So, next time you hear a song and started tapping your foot along to the beat, know it most likely is not a coincidence that the song came up on your queue. It's Big Data from various streaming services being utilized within the music industry, and this is all just grazing the surface.
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