Data & Music Rights

The Nuances of the Crossover Effect: Maximising the Impact of Artists Collaborations on Spotify Recommender Algorithms

Back in 2023, the French indie label Tôt ou Tard brought Music Tomorrow on board to work on the optimization of the upcoming Vianney release — a collaborative album featuring dozens of artists. Here's how we leveraged our data tools to help the team deliver an optimization strategy that led to a near 3x uplift in algorithmic streams.

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Unlocking Spotify Algorithms: Proven Strategies from 2 Years of Boosting Artist Visibility on Streaming Platforms

Two years ago, we started developing our own platform, based on our knowledge about music recommender systems, to help labels make their artists more visible. Since then, we made significant advancements: you can now use our analytics tools to gain insights into how Spotify's algorithms perceive your music, and use this information to amplify your online presence. We collaborated with both major and independent industry players, including Universal Music Group, Warner Music, Handwritten Records, Tôt ou Tard, Because Music, among others, to fine-tune our tools and data, ensuring they meet the evolving needs of artists and labels alike.

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Getting it right: How our Data-Driven Approach Helped an Indie Label Drive 11X Algorithmic Streams for Newly Released Music

We bring you our first case study, showcasing how Music Tomorrow leveraged its proprietary data tools to gain clear insight into the algorithmic positioning of an artist on Spotify and develop an optimization strategy that had a clear and strong positive effect on the algorithmic performance of the newly released music

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The (Negative) Impact of Fake Streams on Artists' Algorithmic Performance

Fake streams are still a widespread practice in the music business — both among the DIY artists and established music professionals. Streaming fraud has its obvious risks, but even if you manage to get away with it, this shortcut will come with a hefty price to pay. Here's why engaging with these fake streaming bot farms is a sure way to ruin your algorithmic potential.

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Towards Recommender System Optimization. Part 2: How Can Artists Influence Recommendation Algorithms?

In the second part in our series on RSO we present a framework for algorithmic optimization on DSPs (and, specifically, Spotify). Learn how you can manage the inputs processed by the recommender to amplify algorithmic traffic and discoverability of your catalog.

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Towards Recommender System Optimization. Part 1: Our Vision and Our Data Tool for Algorithmic Optimization on Streaming Platforms

This is the first part in our series on algorithmic optimization on streaming platforms or simply RSO (for Recommender System Optimization). In this introductory piece, we will cover Music Tomorrow’s approach to algorithmic optimization and present the data tool we’ve developed that allows us to extract and analyze artists’ algorithmic profiles on Spotify.

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GDPR & Music Data Ownership: Should We Treat Artist Data as Personal Data?

Could the data collected in connection to the artist's career be considered personal data? And if so, what would be the implications for the music data industry? We detail the issue of GDPR compliance in the music business to try and get to the bottom of it.

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Is the Spotify Editorial Playlist Landscape Fair to Emerging Artists?

Today, editorial playlists across major streaming services like Spotify are some of the most valuable real estate in the music business. But how fair is the editorial landscape when it comes to showcasing independent, emerging artists? We run the analysis of the biggest playlists on Spotify to try and answer that question

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Inside Spotify’s Recommender System: A Complete Guide to Spotify Recommendation Algorithms

Check out the most complete and up-to-date guide to Spotify recommendation algorithm, sourced by years of experience working in music RecSys.

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Inside TikTok's "For You" Algorithm: Guide for Artists & Musicians

Check out the latest guide to the TikTok "For You" algorithm for creators and musicians, sourced by the recently leaked internal documents.

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Under the Hood: How Revelator Uses Data to Accelerate the Streaming Economy

Take a deep dive into the Original Works the revenue per stream estimation model that powers Revelator's daily advance program, that beats established music industry revenue distribution processes by more than 3 months

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Monetizing Discoverability: Our Take on Spotify's Discovery Mode

Spotify's Discovery Mode: another nail in the streaming economy's coffin, or a long-awaited DSP ad tool for artists? Here's our take on it.

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Fairness in Question: Do Music Recommendation Algorithms Value Diversity?

How fair music recommendation algorithms actually are? And what we could do to build more diverse music recommender systems? Let's find out!

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Why Go to Live Shows? Music Tomorrow's Report on 17 Factors of Attendance in the Live Industry

We've summarized the existing academic literature at the intersection of live music, psychology, and consumer behavior to compile an exhaustive list of attendance factors that drive people to go out to live shows — get your free PDF report now

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Are We at the Dawn of A&R Data Wars?

A&R is one of the most data-driven positions in the music industry. But how much of a competitive advantage is data analytics to an A&R if the entire industry is ultimately looking at the same open-API-sourced dataset, processed by slightly different algorithms? 

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What the genre distribution of viral songs tells us about TikTok, globalization and cultural influence

In this piece, we wanted to research and understand which new trends are influencing music consumption today. We analyzed genres among both global and local charts to picture current dynamics within the music industry.

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"The job will never be finished": diving into music rights data and royalty systems with Phil Barry from Blokur

Check out our exclusive interview with Phil Barry, Founder at Blokur on how his company addresses one of the toughest issues of the publishing industry regarding royalty payments: data management.

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A new way to think about SEO in the music industry

When it comes to music SEO, the property you’re optimizing is a song (and sometimes a video or a playlist), and in the best-case scenario, you have just a few lines of text to work with.But can these few lines still make a difference? Let’s try and figure it out. 

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Music Rights and NFTs: What should we (realistically) expect?

Right now most NFT offerings can be described as simple digital collectibles. Yet, there’s a potential for NFTs in music to become so, so much more

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Data Cheat Sheet: A summary of data ownership in the live events industry

Data flows in the live industry are extremely complex. Ticketing platforms, promoters, venues, festivals, agents, bookers, and artist managers all collect and use data. That's why we've summed it all up in a to help you navigate this dataverse of the live industry

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“A&R has always been about data”: a deep dive into the role of data in A&R with Chaz Jenkins, CCO at Chartmetric

An exclusive interview with Chaz Jenkins, Chief Commercial Officer at Chartmetric, discussing the role of data in A&R and how it evolved over the years as the analytics tools advanced.

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Understanding music discovery algorithms - How to amplify an artist’s visibility across streaming platforms

Check out this piece based on the panel about Streaming & Algorithms I organized with shesaid.so France during the JIRAFE event put together by the Réseau MAP in Paris, where I interviewed Elisa Gilles, Data Scientist Manager at Deezer, and Milena Taieb, Global Head of Trade Marketing and Partnerships at Believe, about music discoverability on digital streaming platforms.

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Jeff Mills teaches astrophysics but when will he actually DJ on Mars?

“The Detroit musician really is taking a trip to the stars in his latest musical venture. He’ll be playing across three turntables, a throwback to his earliest performances. “A DJ playing in space is so obviously the future,” The Wizard told Mixmag. “So I wanted to balance that with analogue technology in its purest form: three perfectly calibrated Technics 1210s.” MixMag

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