[MUSIC] Historically, the music business has been driven by a lot of a gut instinct, a lot of emotion, a lot of very colorful people. But it has not been all that efficient at predicting future trends. The greatest talent scout probably in the history of rock music was a guy named John Hammond who had signed Bob Dylan to his contract at Columbia Records based on a gut feeling about him. There was nothing to suggest in the beginning that Bob Dylan would become the artist that he is today and the influence that he is today. In addition, it used to be that DJs played a song because they liked it or maybe because somebody bribed them to play it but it was a little bit more freewheeling and based on personalities. In addition, in recording studios, there have been countless examples of either experiments gone awry or accidents that turned out to be fantastic sounding. This has led to new sounds along the way, and innovations in recording technology by doing things quote unquote, the wrong way. Also in the past, business could track the number of radio spins in a particular town and the number of albums that had been sold but they didn't really know very much about how music was consumed outside of those pieces of data. In fact, even sometimes, this data was misleading. About 15 years ago, I guess it was, a manger of a band that I was playing in got a phone call from a guy in Spain that said, we want to book your band for a month tour in Spain. And the manager woman said, what are you talking about? We've never sold any records in Spain. And he said, yes, you had. There was this whole thing about imports being less expensive for Spanish people to buy and so they were actually huge and didn't even know it. It was one of those things that would probably not happen today. Another way that that opportunities may have been missed in the old way of doing things is if you can imagine, say for example, a high school student in the mid 1980s buys a record, talks about that new album with their friends at school, maybe burns cassette copies for people because they're so excited about this new band. That person listens obsessively over and over in their bedroom every night to this new record and maybe made a homemade t-shirt or traveled an hour to the next town to see them live and then bought a t-shirt with their babysitting cash. All of that behavior, from burning the cassettes to talking to friends about it to sharing the music with people was untrackable from a business person's point of view. Today, all of that behavior that I just described, including the sale of imports and whether or not your band is huge in Spain, would be a lot more easy to track. Not only that, but would be connected to particular consumers. Businesses in the music industry are taking advantage of an unprecedented amount of data that is available about music consumers these days. Artists and business people who represent can track plays on various streaming sites. They can pinpoint geographical locations where songs are catching on and even predict where the song will catch on next, based on previous trends. They can watch artists on social media and see how the noise about them is growing. They can predict months ahead of time which songs will be hit nationally, and internationally. They can track how often people talk about certain musicians on social media, how often they share tracks, or upload tracks. They can collect information about the gender, age, and other traits, of listeners. In short, data analytics regarding music is driving music business decisions to a greater extent than ever before. From the point of view of a person who finds analytics useful, this allows businesses to predict future success of songs and artists and helps promotional resources be more effectively targeted. You're not going to waste your money on songs or on artists that are not connecting, or that you know will never connect. Forbes Magazine called one music analytics company, Moneyball for music, which I thought was really interesting. it's a reference to the use of data, of course, in baseball and in other sports. There's a similar feeling among some musicians and people in the music industry that this approach may work and may actually be the future of the industry and give outsiders a chance. But it takes some of the unpredictability, some of the fun, some of the heart out of the game. In addition, data is sometimes misinterpreted. It can lead businesspeople to uncomfortable conclusions and force decisions to be made that would not have been made otherwise. A lot of people still have privacy concerns about the amount of data that is being gathered on listeners. And data can't predict how an artist is going to develop in the future, if you look back on our Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen examples. When decisions are made on real time public reaction to new music, it's difficult to imagine how there could be a hit record that is ahead of it's time. Or what happens to the music that is going to challenge listeners to try something new? These are things to consider when you are balancing the weight of data analytics in music. [MUSIC] [APPLAUSE]