Spotify and Musicmetric want to watch what you're streaming

Spotify and Musicmetric have joined forces to provide the music industry with analytic data. But what does that actually mean?

Musicmetric has announced a deal with Spotify that will allow its users to benchmark Spotify data alongside social media trends and file sharing information.

For those that aren’t aware – which, to be honest, will be most people – Musicmetric tracks online trends in music and makes this data available to music industry types. The data covers activity on social media, responses on news and blogs, sales and file sharing activity through BitTorrent networks. Last year they developed an app for the BBC which allowed you to see your area’s most illegally downloaded artist.

Musicmetric will integrate Spotify streaming data, allowing it to be analysed alongside this other data. Anyone with Spotify analytics will be able to access their data through Musicmetric, meaning streaming data can be analysed alongside social media trends, BitTorrent usage and blog sentiment. They will also have access to both the historical and the real-time listening data of Spotfy’s users.

For the industry, this means that all key data streams can now be analysed in one place, so they can see in pure numbers how effective their marketing campaigns are.

Obviously this opens up some questions without simple answers. Is this the logical conclusion of the ever-growing (and flawed) reliance on statistics and analytics – streams, page hits, buzz – within the music industry? Is it right that a Spotify user’s historic listening data should become a commodity that can be bought and sold?

You can read a slightly more in-depth piece about the deal at MusicWeek.

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