Big Data Is Big Business
Technology and music has become so synonymous with each other in the modern age, to the point where algorithms are being developed to create playlists for consumers. One would assume that companies like Apple and Spotify are in the music business, I would argue that this isn’t the case and that their actually in the business of big data.

Firstly, what is big data? According to searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com it is “is an evolving term that describes any voluminous amount of structured, semi structured and unstructured data that has the potential to be mined for information. Big data is considered to be the one of the most valuable assets that a company has. While in its raw form, its considered to not be very useful but when mined it can be used to plan the trajectory of the company, project profit and losses (when mined) for example 1 million people listened to Ghetts new album. With that he can use that information to plan a tour (FREE PLUG GHETTS IS GOING ON TOUR IN JANUARY 2019).

Spotify are a data driven company. They use data as a means to train their algorithms to create uniquely curated playlists for each consumer which birthed their most popular feature, discover weekly. As mentioned in a previous article, they also use the data as a means to curate unique fan engaged events for artists. Artists such as Kylie Minogue and Stormzy are examples of this. Speculation time! As mentioned in a previous article, Spotify are on the way to being a conglomerate and apart of that would be to establishing a record label, however I do not believe they will like to be labelled as such but I do believe its coming and there are many examples to back my claim, Drake’s shameless promo of his latest album all over Spotify, their focus on fan engagement, their investment on Distrokid and many others.

Apple made their intent on big data very apparent with their latest purchase, Shazam! It was confirmed in December of 2017 that the acquisition was happening, but what does this mean? Its reported that it has been downloaded over 1 billion times and is used over 20 million times per day (The Verge) the information that can be mined can be used to another stream of income for instance, the powers that be at Apple music may be able to identify trends that gives them a clearer idea of ‘popular’ or ‘rising’ stars, maybe even sign them…

Whilst human curation is still very much a thing and will continue to be, the rise of data driven playlists and recommendations is here to stay in the music business. With information like this, what’s stopping companies like Spotify, Apple music, Deezer and others from set up record labels and signing artist based on their analytics?
['Notes']
['Music', 'Technology', 'Big Data']