Powering More Ad Tech: Music Industry AI Disrupting Multi-Billion Dollar Markets
A musician’s success is no longer a juggle between talent and creativity.
With countless artists vying for viewership on a handful of social media and digital streaming platforms, paid advertising has become a necessity more than a support mechanism for building expansive fanbases.
This is not to say that organic is a thing of the past, but for the type of growth an artist needs to establish a monetizable audience, the organic route is on average 3.5X longer and riskier than a well-deployed engagement campaign.
Scaling through their career today is fundamentally a financial venture outside of the bohemian escapism of the “starving musician.”
Despite the empowerment felt on the independent side of the equation, long-lasting and profitable music careers are not as common. Most artists still want that position with one of the big four labels, but labels understand that when talent is in high supply, everyone else needs to come in with a market more than a sound.
The Pain of Process
For independent artists, the very process of marketing, ads and promo is beyond overwhelming. More than time-consuming, industry professionals everywhere agree it deprives them of their creative flow and can completely demoralize them. At our office and even some of our partner agencies, the adoption of ad-tech and AI was non-negotiable. UX goes a long way.
It was earlier this year when our social team was in an uproar when Facebook changed its Meta Business outline, again—this time making scheduling posts an anxious hazard. Something as simple as a more user-friendly dashboard has sparked the birth of thousands of SaaS products that match the mosaic of an agency’s or artist’s work culture. With an estimated CAGR of 12.9% for the next five years, it looks like ad tech is going to be leading the pack to fill in that gap. For agencies, this can be a serious issue. Some may ultimately drown in the flood of new tech, should they be incapable of besting the reach of a well-informed artist with a digital tool kit.
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The first side to the ad-tech medal is data insights, where correlated user info and market trends help the decision-making phase of the operation. Big data has been an integral partner in the new age of the music industry and whether it’s pairing with suggestive AI or its use as a UX-friendly map, a substantial step has been taken in the direction of artist enablement. Imagine minimizing ad spend on maybes and maximizing definitive fans.
For today’s consumer, music discovery is 70% on TikTok, YouTube or Spotify; that’s why lots of apps exist like Chartmetrics or Song Statswhich adopt a centralized dashboard to visualize the data pulled from these discovery platforms. Having a few numbers in the same place can make a difference in an artist’s perception of their journey.
Hybrid SaaS For Music
So what’s next? Once you have the numbers in hand, you still need to plan and execute the schedule, be it posting or releasing. Task-handling AI or automation is finally in a state of fluidity with today’s industry, where they are not attached to heavy software or cumbersome web apps.
As a big fan of AI, I have found that suggestive AI regarding strategy has its limitations when deciphering or qualifying what is a positive return for the artist. Would Artist X be better off advertising in the top 10 places with the most fans, or would an expansion to a fan base overseas make the most difference? With strategic visualization, ad tech simplifies the target discovery for artists but still does not recommend the way an agency can.
With the rise and plateau of paid media, hybrid SaaS products like Symphony tie in analytics to fully automated ad tech, a data-driven solution that streamlines ad management and is simple enough to use by any artist. What I’m interested in seeing is how the market will react by having artists do a small part of the work yet still need the executives to plan long-term strategies. The new generation is tech-mature enough to be able to customize many of these apps, and as the state of streaming is in constant growth, the precision of automation will likely govern the success of the content.
Conclusion
That crossover between music and the music business stands as the most significant tell-tales of a creative entrepreneur’s capacity for growth. With digital tool kits leading the modern industry, artists who can afford the services can have a leg up financially and algorithmically on their counterparts.
Once exclusively for the middle tier of the music industry pyramid, access to analytical knowledge and ease of use for ad operations is now available for monthly subscriptions. AI will likely bring fundamental disruption to the multi-billion dollar music promotion industry of today. Artists could have access to far greater control over their career essentials be it through virtual assistants, publicists, automation tech or data analytics. For labels, this has simplified a lot of their A&R work and could open the way for promising talent to unlock their actual potential. For me, I think the industry needed a shake-up like the one ad-tech and suggestive AI is bringing forward. What comes next is to see if the artist landscape will be different by the end of the year or will this divide between independent and label-signed deepen?