Nowadays, there is no current service that includes all the necessary insights needed for a record company, live music company or background music company to make well-informed decisions or get the full overview in their area of expertise.

However, there are a number of established music intelligence applications and services on the market. Those typically offer one or more of the following features: 

• music popularity tracking
• music audience analysis
• live event analytics

 
 

Although the most advanced of the existing music analytics solutions address a number of needs of the music professionals, we have identified a number of key functionalities that are considered of particular importance by music professionals, but are not addressed by existing solutions.

As we analyze in our Deliverable ‘D1.1 Music Industry Innovation Report v1’, most solutions offer little or no support at all for predictive analysis, i.e. they only provide views of the current or historic music popularity, and leave it to end users to make estimates on future popularity. The opportunity for FuturePulse is to combine different signals and data sets existing in the consortium and collected from external sources, including emotional indexed tracks (Musimap), audio analysis (IRCAM), music play in radio/TV (BMAT) and social media coverage (CERTH), and to translate them into functions for predicting future sales and revenues, for all three use cases.

Predictive analysis in the music industry is growing and the most innovative solutions are usually acquired by major companies in the early production years. An application able to manage the increasing required data to be included and analysed by all the solutions is needed by the businesses.

FuturePulse will meet these requirements by providing a complete set of data analysis and smart data processing ranging from the usual audio content recognition, sells, plays, social media, etc. to future analysis data sets like influential social media activities, musical crushes, data collected by new types of devices (connected objects, NFC tags, cloud based data mining, beacons, etc.).

Existing solutions currently offer analytics solely on a per artist basis. Hence, location-focused search and comparison of music popularity is not possible at this time. Yet, this is an essential feature for live music professionals (venue managers, event organizers) who are interested in an overview of music popularity, specifically for their area of interest.

For FuturePulse, the possibility lays in developing and providing data feeds that are based on many more parameters than currently available, such as audio analysis, social media statistics, emotional indexing and broadcast data. A background music provider could make use of this data feed and integrate it in to its end product. A live event organizer could use the data for predictions of ticket sales and popularity, and a record label could use the data to understand future music trends, how social media activities influence popularity, and decision making regarding releases and artist signings.
 
You can read the Deliverable ‘D1.1 Music Industry Innovation Report v1’ here.