Apple music introduces analytics for artists

The platform called Apple Music for Artists is coming out of BETA and will now be available for every artist on Apple Music.

Artists or their teams can sign up and claim their account at artists.apple.com in order to be able to gain access to invaluable streams and sales data that will assist in their day-to-day or long-term strategic planning.

The platform has been years in the making and has received the necessary improvements after Apple listened to and incorporated feedback from the artists currently participating in the BETA phase of the rollout. 

“The result is an industry-leading tool for artists and their teams that we believe is the very best available,” said Apple in a statement. 

Apple Music for Artists will launch as a brand new standalone iOS app for iPhone and will provide 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 setlists for fans in each city, vary promotions by region, or uncover unknown areas of popularity around the world.

“We’ve also added additional features and capabilities including an integration with Shazam. Now artists can see their Shazam data, including the top shazamed cities and countries, in their Apple Music for Artists profile,” added Apple. 

Some other additions to Apple Music for Artists include: 

• The average number of daily listeners of their music. Average daily listeners can be viewed by country, city or song.
• Plays from Playlists now offers more detailed information about the playlists an artists’ songs have been added to and where those songs are positioned in the playlists. They can also see across which countries your song is included in the playlist.
• Music video views and performance metrics.

“We’ve updated our weekly data to cover music industry standard release weeks to enable artists to better monitor week-to-week success,” said Apple, before adding “Apple Music for Artists is like having your own data scientists and analytics expert on call 24/7, translating all of your data into easy-to-understand insights.”

Artists are automatically alerted when there are important and meaningful changes to their data, such as; first week plays of a new release will be compared to all previous first-week plays, new milestones like “1 Million Plays” will be highlighted so they can be celebrated with fans, sudden spikes in streams anywhere in the world will help focus efforts in the right places and seminal moments like being added to an Apple Music playlist.