UK Firm to Offer Music Analytics Service

In the UK, music industry financing platform Slicethepie has launched a web-based consumer insight and music analytics service which it claims will help identify the commercial potential of any track, and give an indication of its most suitable target market.

Through the Slicethepie web site, music fans earn money by reviewing tracks, spotting new talent and ensuring the best artists get put forward for financing. Reviews are compared against tens of thousands of tracks and millions of reviews in the firm's database. These are then analysed using linguistic algorithms to automatically identify the emotions a track generates in the listener.

The firm's new SoundOut service provides artists, managers, record labels and publishers with detailed information on any music track, along with comparative analysis - even on tracks that have never been heard before.

After uploading a track onto the new service, users receive a market insight report containing details about which gender and age group the music appeals to, whether the track has broad or niche appeal, as well as music reviews submitted by the fans.

'With more than 10 million artists and countless music consumers now online, there is an ever-growing need for objective analysis and consumer powered filtering,' the firm's CEO David Courtier-Dutton explained. 'When we saw the statistical integrity of the data being generated from the Slicethepie reviewers, we knew we were onto something important.'

In addition, Slicethepie can split a track into its constituent parts (eg vocals, production, composition, guitar, performance etc) and then apply sentiment analysis to each element. The firm says this enables an artist or manager to identify the strong and weak elements of a track and make adjustments as required - an approach guaranteed to go down a storm with creative purists.

Paul Brown, Commercial Director of Slicethepie, stated: 'Rapidly declining revenues in the music industry require new approaches in terms of reducing the cost base for making and marketing music - objective data and smart analytics are absolutely vital to achieving this.'

Web sites: www.slicethepie.com and www.soundout.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.