Several factors have really started to come together to result in a plethora of metrics being applied to music.  Record sales (and download sales) are no longer the only relevant metric for analyzing an artist’s fanbase.  I’ve personally seen an artist play a single concert to a room holding more fans than have bought their newest album in the entire country.  Ticket sales are a good metric, but that data isn’t readily accessible, or accurate until you’re working with promoters and ticketing agencies.  But with so many bands playing bar and club shows for cover-charge instead of hard tickets, that metric isn’t a good place to start either.  Radio play is another traditional metric, but access to that data for an indie artist is very expensive.

Add to all that, now the main ways artists are connecting with fans are all taking place online, where everything is trackable, and in comes web services offering email subscription tracking, myspace plays, youtube streams, blog-status grading, web-traffic measurements, “hit potential” analyzers, and more.

With more and more onus on bands to develop themselves, before working with business partners, it’s going to become increasingly important for musicians to become even more savvy marketers.  To understand all the different and powerful analytics that are available, and interpret the data into actions is going to become increasingly time-consuming (and potentially costly, if these services start introducing paid-subscription business models, which is the current norm for analytics services).

For a musician who’s looking to immerse themselves in information, and study their fan metrics intently, this onslaught is a dream come true, but on the other hand, when your main job it is to be creative, write, perform and practice, this could also become a real problem of time-management.

So what are services like the below doing to make this as easy and understandable as possible for musicians?

What services do musicians find provide the most useful and actionable information?

What are musicians saying about these and other services?

Is this type of information something a musician should pay for?

Are there other services out there that should be added to this list?

Music Metrics Services:

• Band Metrics
• Google Analytics
• Fanalytics
• Rockdex
• Artistdata
• MusicXRay
• Next Big Sound