Metrics and New Measurements of Success

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The launch of BandMetrics had me all excited – I really thought it was a game changer in the music industry and said as much.

So I suppose an explanation is in order. Basically, it’s about Clout. In essence, the web knows something, something deeply intricate about how people listen to our music, how people talk about it and as Seth Godin puts it, it’s not telling. At least, not yet.

Amazon’s “people who bought x also bought y” was the Penny Farthing bicycle of this stone age process of understanding how your fans interact with you. LastFM’s Music Manager or YouTube’s Insight is the pneumatic tire, just one part of an important whole. Google Analytics is great but is too technical for a quick read.

What we need is the automobile version of this process – a process simple enough and precise enough to quickly and easily interpret data and get where we need to go .

I’m not going to categorize BandMetrics in this light as it’s still in beta, but I feel it’s the first attempt to really tackle what is, to me, an essential problem with marketing music online.

Essentially, right now we’re using an ax when what we need is a scalpel.

And if you develop the scalpel, you’ll do one of two things:

1) You’ll create an incredibly valuable piece of software that could be potentially very lucrative.
2) You’ll increase exponentially the chances of artists becoming marginally profitable.