Apple launches Apple Music for Artists to track downloads, streams, and more

“Today Apple launches Apple Music for Artists, a dashboard designed to provide acts with hundreds of data points giving deep analytical insight into their fans’ listening and buying habits,” Melinda Newman reports for Billboard. “The initial beta rollout involves a few thousand artists who will test the product and see what adjustments and expansions, if any, should be made before Apple Music for Artists opens in the Spring to the several million artists with content on the iTunes and Apple Music platforms. Later plans call for a mobile app. ”

“The easily navigable dashboard’s home page provides artists with their current number of plays, spins, song purchases and album purchases,” Newman reports. “Apple Music for Artists debuts more than two years after Spotify, Pandora and YouTube bowed their own artist dashboards. While admittedly a late entry, Apple hopes to make up for its tardiness with the depth of information available, level of transparency and the ease of use provided by the clean user interface.”

“A global map allows musicians to click on any of the 115 countries in which Apple Music/iTunes is available and find out what’s happening with their music. They can select individual cities and see how many plays and sales they have in each market, as well as look at their top songs in every city. They may further examine the listener demographics per city, for example, calling up how many times females ages 16-24 in Los Angeles have listened to a particular song,” Newman reports. “Ideally, the deep dive could help an artist decide tour routing based on which cities are responding best to their music, as well as even plan a set list based on their top tracks in a town.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: This could quickly become an invaluable tool for artists and their management. Hopefully, Apple will figure out a way to include revenue figures as well (the report says Apple decided against including financials in the initial public beta due to the “complexity of how royalty payments are calculated.”)