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Spotify unveils treasure trove of listener data to artists with Fan Insights portal

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Spotify may not offer big financial dividends for most artists but it does have one extremely valuable asset for musicians and their managers: mountains, and mountains of data.

That’s the basis for Spotify’s new free tool for musicians, the Fan Insights portal, which gives artists and managers a variety of information, including monthly plays of their music, fans, location data, demographic information, their listeners’ other music preferences, and fans’ engagement levels. The initiative is part of Spotify for Artists, the streamer’s online outlet which explains the intricacies of the system to artists and their teams.

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Considering that more than 75 million music-loving fans use Spotify, which logs 1.7 billion hours of music per month, the value of data from the service certainly can’t be understated. For example, Fan Insights could significantly help an artist’s touring strategy and marketing tactics. While the service doesn’t explicitly say so, we imagine their recent acquisitions of analytics companies Seed Scientific and The Echo Nest help power the new service.

Recode further explains that the portal will be able to give information about the number of casual listeners, repeat listeners, and super fans listening to any given artist. The streamer will even be able to give artists the ability to contact and give rewards directly to the highest repeat listeners.

Spotify certainly isn’t the only streaming service to offer detailed analytics for its artists. Pandora, which just bought troubled on-demand streamer Rdio (and, earlier this year, music analytics firm Next Big Sound), has its own version of the tool called the Artist Marketing Platform. Other services like YouTube and Soundcloud also offer some listener data to artists. Notably, the service often seen as Spotify’s main competitor, Apple Music, doesn’t have a similar tool available for its artists — yet.

Fan Insights, currently in limited beta, launches today on desktop and mobile. In the coming months, Spotify will open up the tool to more artists and their management. Those who are interested in joining the limited beta can request access here.

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