In the age of streaming, is radio still worth it?

Slap me with a walkman and call me a boomer, but I still listen to most of my music on the radio. Might be because I spend a lot of my time in the car, and when I’m driving, I’m switching radio stations more often than lanes.

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Who were the “Lockdown Winners” on Spotify?

With touring and live events at a standstill from April 2020 to April 2021, both musicians and audiences turned to streaming. Music research and analytics platform Viberate looked into the numbers to pinpoint the artists who made the most of the situation on Spotify.

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The Influence of Community on The Pluralist Generation and Its Music Consumption

In 2012, we at Gracie Management created a model to predict high music consumption among Millennials and what drives music consumption, which led to great conversation. Since then, we have conducted new research and analysis, this time among the next generation – The Pluralist Generation (Plurals). The Plurals, as coined by Magid Generational Strategies, are those born beginning in 1997 and defined as least likely to believe in the American Dream, affected blended gender roles, last generation with a Caucasian majority, etc.

You can read the Gracie Management full report on the influence of music-based communities on Plurals’ music consumption habits – click here. For a quick take, here are the core findings and implications:

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What Actually Drives Music Consumption

I created the conceptual model to understand the independent variables that help predict music consumption, along with predicting how much change in those independent variables can impact one’s consumption of music in a way that leads to revenue for an artist, an artists’ label et al.

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Spotiwhy? : Are Subscription Music Services a Sustainable Business Model?

This essay is neither for nor against subscription music services, and will focus on answering four questions. 1) What is the revenue potential for subscription music services? 2) What are the most likely rates per stream? 3) How much money can an artist expect to make from subscription music? 4) Is a compulsory rate a sustainable business model?

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Who Cares?

How important is it to know who really cares about your business or your music?

Until very recently, most successful businesses would aim to market their goods or services to the ‘safe centre’, the large section of society that follow the crowd in seemingly predictable ways.

Trend setters, geeks and super-fans were not worth marketing to directly because there are never enough of them to sustain growth.

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How To Sell And Market Your Music Using The Latest Research

If you keep an eye out for the latest research on music consumption habits, you can use these statistics to help guide you in creating an effective sales and marketing plan for your music releases.

After all, that’s how the marketing department of a major record company would operate - basing their plans on the latest market research.

If you’re despairing at the idea of having to add market research to your “to do” list, don’t worry - there’s an easy way. Just google for Google Alerts, and set up a few alerts such as “music consumption research”, “music consumer survey”, or “music market research”. The latest research will just appear in your email inbox.

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Do We Consume Music More, Enjoy It Less?

Scientists say that our brain reacts to great music similar to way it reacts to sex.

In both of these situations, the experience of pleasure that we have is mediated by the release of the brain’s reward chemical, dopamine. This finding is based on the results of experiments done by analyst Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Music produces an intellectual reward, because the listener has to follow the sequence of notes to appreciate it. For the study, the participants were asked to choose instrumental pieces of music that gave them goosebumps. Lyrics were banned, so the associations the participants might have to the words in the music didn’t confound the final results.

Songs couldn’t have specific memories attached either.

While listening to their chosen music, Salimpoor’s team measured things like heart rate and increases in respiration and sweating. During these listening sessions, a 6-9% relative increase in their dopamine levels was detected in participates when compared to a control condition in which participants had listened to each other’s music selections.

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