How using data can improve your streaming service
Having access to relevant data in the music industry is paramount. With millions of events going on around the world each week and with hundreds of thousands of artists trying to get their breakthrough, having the right information before the others do can mean the difference between making it or breaking it. We at Viberate analyze billions of data points for artists, venues, events and festivals and we’re giving you access to it.
When pitching Viberate, we often get asked about the size of our database. We currently feature almost half a million of musician profiles, while others (including streaming giants) claim they have millions of artists.
Truth is they don’t. We pride ourselves in keeping our database up to date and relevant. Sometimes size alone does matter, but this is not the case with data. Here, quality needs to come first.
Viberate offers a variety of services streaming providers can use to improve their user experience and overall customer satisfaction.
REMOVING DOUBLE ENTRIES AND SPLITTING JOINED ARTIST IDs
A part of keeping our database relevant is making sure you won’t find any double entries when discovering new artists. This is where all streaming services need to do better. If you go to almost any streaming provider and want to listen to Eminem’s legendary masterpiece Stan, you’ll see that the artist performing it is “Eminem feat. Dido”. Streaming services manage artist features as a new artist, instead of two separate artists joining forces.
This kind of messed up data structure makes it impossible for recommendation engines to do their job properly, it ruins your user experience and creates an overall mess when trying to exchange data with compatible services such as ticket providers.
Plugging into Viberate’s Artist API can take away much of this pain as our Artist IDs are unique, structured and interconnected.
USE OUR GENRE LIBRARY TO IMPROVE RECOMMENDATIONS
Back in the days it used to be easy. You had disco, rock, jazz and classical music. That covered almost everything. But today you can easily get lost in a pile of genres artists made up. Spotify alone features over 1,500 of them.
With a lot of help from our community, we are constantly mapping tracks and artists to fit into our limited genre and subgenre library. It’s a constant process, but this allows us to structure our data in a way that makes it easier for recommendation engines to suggest similar tracks and artists, without having to deal with messy and completely incompatible data from various sources.
ENRICH ARTIST PROFILES WITH DAILY UPDATED INFORMATION AND CONTENT FEED
We can also improve the user experience by feeding updated content from artists’ social media and other official channels. Content that we can embed into those services is equipped with metadata, so we can feature the artist’s hottest YouTube video of the week, or most engaging picture from Instagram in the last month.
Content is king and with streaming services this is paramount. But serving music isn’t the only content they need to take care of. In order for listeners to discover new music, artist profiles need to be more thorough, allowing users to quickly find out more about artist that are yet unknown to them. In order to keep the listeners engaged, an empty profile, featuring only the artist’s profile photo with an outdated bio won’t do the job. Listeners need to have a chance to quickly check the artist’s hottest stuff, maybe check gig dates or see the artist’s hottest YouTube video of the past week. We can provide such a service and we’re very good at it.
Do you work for a streaming provider? Get in touch or check out our API website:
https://www.viberate.com/product/viberate-api/