Rhapsody And BandPage Harness The Power Of Big Data To Provide The Complete Music Experience
Rhapsody, the music streaming pioneer, and BandPage, the central marketplace that over 500,000 musicians use to engage and sell to hundreds of millions of fans, have launched a partnership that creates a full-service, personalized streaming experience. Rhapsody users will not only get to listen to all the music they want but also be alerted when their favorite band is coming to town and receive more information about new bands they discover. The biggest fans – those who listen and engage the most – will be treated as VIPs and be directly notified of special opportunities such as private shows, custom recordings and more.
Every day Rhapsody users listen to tracks, “favorite” songs, follow musicians and share tracks with friends. Taken together, these millions of data points paint a clear picture of fans’ favorite musicians. To give fans more of what they love, Rhapsody will now deliver fans compelling things from their favorite musicians like upcoming shows and special opportunities about the band. The insights to what fans want are derived by applying complex analytics to the “big data” sets created by Rhapsody users. This data is only used to provide relevant offers and users can opt out of notifications, if they choose.
“We’ve known that we were sitting on a goldmine of information about music fans and have been looking for ways to help drive revenue for musicians while improving the user experience,” said Greg Spils, Director, Traffic & Demand at Rhapsody International. “By partnering with BandPage, we’ve lit upon a solution to create the full music service experience: one place where fans can listen to music, get updates and special offers from their favorite bands, and learn about new bands.”
BandPage is a marketplace with more music-related offers than any other platform in the world. Like most online marketplaces, BandPage uses behavioral targeting, analyzing large data sets to understand which fans would be interested in which offer, and leverages that insight to display the right offer to the right fan at the right time. The music industry, with its billions of monthly active online users, has online engagement, the raw ingredient for effective behavioral targeting, that dwarfs almost every other industry on earth. This creates an unprecedented opportunity to leverage this method of targeting, ultimately creating a better user experience for fans and more revenue for musicians.
“At BandPage, we’re always striving to find the most powerful ways to generate revenue for musicians and now what we’ve been working on for years is a reality,” said J Sider, CEO and Founder of BandPage. “For the first time ever, we can help musicians reach their fans where they are spending the most time in a highly targeted way which also creates a great user experience for the fan. The fan never gets anything that feels like spam, they will only see offers for their favorite bands. It’s truly a ‘win-win’ where the fan gets what they want, which, in turn, drives more revenue for musicians.”
In the same way other big data analytics firms use data from major streaming services to power music recommendations, BandPage is using data to help streaming services know what tour date or special offer to display to the fan with the goal of creating a better user experience for the fan and more revenue for the band.
“From where we sit this is a fundamental shift in the way we run our business,” said Tim Hunkele, VP of digital strategy for Wiz Khalifa. “We used to reach our fans on our website and social media. However, as the music industry shifts, our fans are spending far more time consuming music on streaming services, so that’s where we need to reach them. Instead of posting the same offers to everyone like we do on Facebook or Twitter; BandPage and Rhapsody help us display the right offers at the right time to the right fan. Musicians have been looking for ways that streaming services can help them drive more revenue; this is it. I see this as a major part of what will drive our revenue moving forward, while making it easy for our fans to find the best experiences tailored to them.”
Source: Rhapsody
