Best Music Analytics Tools for Musicians in 2024

Music analytics have long been powerful tools providing far-reaching insights into the performance of artists’ music, as well as modern consumer’s behavior. ‘Big data is the real value of streaming music, not the money’, some experts even say. Knowing what you’re doing right with your music and how listeners engage with it can be essential for your career.

Although the media emphasizes its huge impact on the success of large music companies, data science is just as crucial for independent artists. Nowadays, a great deal of platform-owned tools, as well as third-party data providers are available to music professionals to easily acquire the information they strive for.

Let’s have a peek at some relevant factors that may assist you in determining which tool is the best fit for you, depending on your budget and your goals!

Platform-owned tools are very much the foundation of music analytics and are especially useful for musicians that are just getting started with music data and statistics.

Data provided:

• A complete count of streams, saves, downloads and followers in real time
• Who your listeners are and where they come from (age, gender, location)
• Audience engagement
• Who is listening to your music at the moment
• Which songs resonate with your audience the most
• Ways in which your audience explores your music

Spotify’s defining advantage against its competitors is the number of subscribers on the platform. As the most-subscribed music streaming service with approximately 172 million subscribers, Spotify for Artists shows the most specific and detailed data sets from analytics. Besides providing basic music analytics data, it also allows you to compare your stats with up to two different artists and see what other musicians your fans like to listen to.

The platform breaks down each playlist which the artist has been featured in across all three playlist categories - algorithmic, editorial and user-generated. This indicates how the audience resonates with your songs and what genre/mood they actually associate your music with across specific markets. Oh, and you can trace your data back to 2015 if you need to!

Absolute play count, average daily listeners, song and album purchases, or Apple radio spins - these are some insights unique to Apple Music for Artists. The tool is greatly intuitive, well-organized, and easy on the eyes. The audience analysis is quite specific, too, providing a clear breakdown with both maps and tables.

As Shazam is also a part of the Apple Inc. family, you can access stats, such as counts, plays or specific audience data, coming from that platform, too. This is very much something you can’t get anywhere else.

What makes Amazon Music for Artists extremely user-friendly are the clean design and clear structure. It’s very easy to find your way through the data provided which can spare some important time for musicians, their teams, and labels. The tool’s analytics are focused on general overview, individual songs’ performance, or insight into artist’s fans and superfans (those that come back to your music frequently). The “Programming” tab then reports on the playlists and stations where your tracks are featured.

The most unique and cool feature on this platform is the Voice tab connected to Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa. The insights on this page provide specific information on your daily or total voice requesters, and show other voice request details concerning artists, their songs, albums or lyrics. This feature can definitely become more relevant in the foreseeable future.

With Deezer for Creators you can definitely access all relevant data you need, track your music’s performance, analyze your audience and monitor your streams on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. All that with quite easy-to read charts that are broken down into various categories, including playlists, releases, or in case of audience, gender, age and location.

The only drawback is that Deezer has a relatively small database in comparison to other music streaming platforms and therefore the data set it provides may not be that extensive and thorough.

As of the end of 2021, YouTube has approximately 2.2 billion users worldwide which crowns it the queen of streaming platforms. The analytics that YouTube Studio offers can therefore come incredibly handy and be a source of useful insights into your video marketing strategy, popularity and growth across the platform.

Most importantly, YouTube leverages greatly from being owned by Google which provides the users of YouTube Studio with exclusive information on the traffic sources for their channel and video views, as well as detailed marketing metrics like impressions, engagement, and click-through-rate (CTR). Detailed insights and an understanding of video metrics can be vital for musicians and their teams. The audience analytics provided by YouTube Studio breaks down returning viewers, unique viewers, and subscribers, and delivers reports on when your viewers are on Youtube, their watch time in hours, what other channels they watch, or what their top end screen element types are. Additionally, the tool is free and it’s extremely swift and simple to sign in and start exploring your data.

The digital music store, Bandcamp, also provides some relevant real-time statistics, most importantly on the popularity of your tracks, your music sales, where your songs are embedded or who’s linking to you and where they are located.

The very fundamental data is available to musicians for free and you can then access deeper stats by upgrading to a Bandcamp Pro or Label user account (if you’re a recording label).

For 10 $/month, or 20 $/month for up to 15 artists in case of a Label account (or 50 $/month for unlimited artists), you can connect your Bandcamp account to Google Analytics and thus reach more detailed statistics about your visitors and music buyers.

If you’re looking for more specific data concerning your music’s performance, enhanced music analytics tools will be more suitable for you. By using them, you will get access to greater insights and a more advanced data set, with a focus on streaming and sales analytics, data on A&R, market intelligence, video- and radio analytics, and much more.

Yes, that’s right! Recently we’ve launched our very own music analytics tool providing musicians with valuable insights into where and when their success comes from. With iMusician’s Music Analytics, you can search and visualize the performance and growing streaming trends towards your releases, old and new, both in real time and over specific time periods. You can then explore and measure these trends and compare their importance across all major stores, markets, and streaming platforms, such as Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Pandora or Napster. Such information will assist you in your promotional and marketing efforts, including the organization of concerts and tours. Just to get a little technical here - our customers have overall access to up to 220 million rows of data which is represented by a 420 Gigabyte data set. Exciting, right!?

What’s more, you can use iMusician’s Music Analytics to explore your listener base and collect factual data on their geographics and demographics, including their gender and the devices they use to actively seek your music. A very special feature is the tracking of artist’s sales and earnings over time, with a particular focus on YouTube monetization earnings and streams and downloads of musician’s releases and tracks.

You can get access to our Music Analytics tool with our AMPLIFY or AMPLIFY+ subscription plans and get all the data you need within our iMusician app. If you started your release with iMusician on our Free Plan, you can simply switch to AMPLIFY or AMPLIFY+ at any time and use the power of data to discover your further potential.

Chartmetric tracks data from a very wide variety of social media channels, streaming platforms and other sources, including Wikipedia; Beatport and QQ Music. The tool provides deep stats and valuable data that enable users to effectively analyze and measure their progress across different platforms. Additionally, the semi-annual ‘breakthrough’ charts grant valuable market insights showing which artists have grown the most over the past 6 months, what platforms have experienced the most recent traction and popularity, and what might be the prediction of future developments in music. Through its “Predictive A&R” function, the platform is also able to spot and track new upcoming trends, and the ‘Playlist Journey’ feature allows musicians to better understand overall playlist ecosystems.

Just like iMusician’s Music Analytics, Chartmetric is subscription-based, but its subscription packages cost way more than just one cup of espresso.

• The BASIC package offered by the platform may be for free but is very data-limited.
• The PREMIUM package is then 140 €/month and their API package is variable and works on a case-by-case basis.

Just like Chartmetric, Soundchart offers a great variety of features, tables, graphs and trending charts with insights into data coming from multiple social media and streaming platforms, and other relevant sources, such as SoundCloud or Songkick. Users can access relevant stats regarding their music consumption, audience engagement and demographics, as well as their playlist activity and their competitors’ performance. Additionally, the tool analyzes musician’s radio performance on more than 1500 FM/AM radio stations and monitors and provides PR artist coverage from important digital publications through their “Press Mentions” feature.

Soundcharts currently offers three paid subscription packages:

• STARTER for 49 €/month
• UNLIMITED for 129 €/month
• ENTERPRISE (variable)

To sum it up, we’ve just covered some of the most important music analytics tools that can help you prosper and further your music career. While platform-owned tools are great for beginners and will provide you with elementary streaming data, song analytics, and audience demographics, advanced tools will allow you to gain more insights into radio and video analytics, music discovery data, and entertainment intelligence.

If you haven’t made up your mind yet, you can go check out our Music Analytics page to inform yourself more about its functionality and benefits!