Artist Growth

Being able to leverage historical data is no longer just a competitive advantage in the music industry — it’s a necessity for crafting strategies that stand out in a saturated market.

Understanding how to leverage this data is crucial for organizations at every level — from DIY bands to solo managers to record labels, talent management agencies, publishers, and more.

Unfortunately, the generic business management tools currently in use by many in our space fail to account for the unique needs of our industry, like providing the ability to capture and recall past campaign and event data, pointing to the need for industry-specific tools and processes.

Dedicated music business management software like Artist Growth Workspace changes that, empowering teams to analyze past performances, audience engagement, and campaign success so that they can make better and more informed decisions.

Here, we explore music business management platforms beyond their role as efficiency tools. As historical event and campaign databases, they provide valuable insights that management teams can use to plan better, more effective marketing and promotional campaigns, tours, partnerships, collaborations, and more.

Why the music industry needs dedicated management software

What does your artist management tech stack look like?

For many, word documents, spreadsheets, and even paper-based workflows are still the norm, with communications spread messily across texts, emails, phone calls, and Slack messages. Others rely on ill-fitting project management tools that do many things, but fail to deliver on the promise of greater productivity. As a result, information is routinely lost or miscommunicated.

The cost of all of this is enormous.

According to a 2022 survey, companies lose as much as $1.3 million dollars a year to inefficient tasks and processes each year. And as a whole, U.S. businesses lose more than $3 trillion annually due to poor data.

There’s also another cost, one that’s more difficult to quantify: The cost of falling behind.

Despite music’s pervasive presence in our lives, the industry itself has often been slow to change. While great strides have been made to collect data from various touch points (think ticket sales, streaming, etc.), the industry has taken a much slower approach to collecting and structuring operational data.

In order to stay ahead of the curve, music businesses must embrace new and disruptive technologies to address their unique operational needs. Music business management software is one such technology.

Unlike one-size-fits-all project management tools, a tool like Artist Growth Workspace enables artists’ teams to manage activities, data, events, and finances in a single, permission-based platform the entire team can rally around. By consolidating and streamlining every aspect of artist management, businesses are able to not only improve communication and efficiency, in the process reducing costs, but also look to historical data to make better decisions.

5 ways music business management software improves efficiency and productivity

Efficiency and productivity are paramount when teams are constantly being asked to do more with less. Here are five ways music business software can help:

1. Time savings

By templatizing repetitive tasks, such as event scheduling, music business management software frees up valuable time for artist managers, labels, and more. This is time that can be better spent on strategic activities that drive artists’ careers forward.

2. Streamlined workflows

Tools like Workspace provide a centralized platform that brings together all aspects of artist management, eliminating the need for multiple tools and manual processes. Individuals and teams can access and manage everything from contact information to event details to guest ticket requests in one place, streamlining workflows and reducing the risk of errors or oversights.

3. Improved organization

Music management software enables teams to organize activities, events, and other data in a structured and systematic manner. The event and campaign database serves as a central repository for all relevant information, making it easy to find and retrieve data quickly. This improves organization, making it easier to uncover insights and even locate past data when team members move on.

4. Enhanced collaboration

Artist management software facilitates collaboration among team members, artists, and external stakeholders, ensuring that everyone involved can work together seamlessly in the pursuit of common goals. This enhanced collaboration fosters creativity, efficiency, and synergy among various teams representing different aspects of an artist’s career.

5. Data-driven decision-making

Data is invaluable for making informed decisions and optimizing strategies. Music business software, with its database of past campaigns and events, enables teams to gain valuable insights into past performances, marketing campaigns and other promotions, internal ticket spend, and more.

Why an event and campaign database is essential to making data-driven decisions

Historical data in the music industry encompasses a wide array of information, from previous concert performances and tour successes to detailed records of marketing campaigns and promotional activities. Within all of this data lies the key to:

Understanding what resonates with audiences
Identifying trends over time
Recognizing patterns that can inform future strategies
Creating new, more efficient processes

By analyzing your campaign and event database, you can pinpoint successful elements that can be replicated or adapted to current and future projects.

Enhancing event planning and management

Information on past event logistics, audience demographics, ticket sales, guarantees, and venue capacities can guide organizers in choosing the right venues, optimizing ticket pricing strategies, and enhancing audience experiences, and determining lineups that draw larger crowds.

Tailoring marketing strategies for maximum impact

By evaluating the outcomes of past campaigns, including promotions, advertising pushes, and event sponsorships, marketers can create more personalized, effective marketing campaigns that achieve better engagement and ROI.

Fostering artist development and growth

Insights gained from past performances, album releases, and promotional activities offer a roadmap for developing an artist's brand and sound. It also enables targeted investment in projects with the highest potential for success, making resource allocation easier.

Choosing the right music business management software

The right management software can revolutionize your business, but the wrong tools can set you back. To help you select the right software, here are some tips to consider:

Identify your needs

Every company, team, and individual has unique requirements based on their artists, career goals, and working style. Before choosing a business management tool, identify your needs and prioritize the features that are most important to you.

Consider scalability

Unless you’re an individual artist, you're probably looking to grow your roster. Look for platforms that offer flexible pricing plans and can accommodate a growing number of artists and team members. It's also crucial that you're able to specify what individual users can access, edit, and so on, making permissions controls an important consideration.

Evaluate ease of use

Did you know that six in 10 leaders report poor experiences with digital tools as a contributing factor in employee turnover?

A user-friendly interface is crucial for maximizing productivity, minimizing learning curves, and attracting and retaining employees. Test out the software's user interface. Is it easy to navigate? How quickly can you can perform common tasks, such as creating events, requesting guest passes, or exporting itineraries?

Research customer support

Effective customer support and training resources are essential for a smooth onboarding process and ensuring ongoing usage. Look for comprehensive documentation, tutorials, new feature announcements, and responsive customer support.

Consider integrations

Integrations with tools like Bandsintown for Artists, Songkick, Google Calendar, iCal, etc., can eliminate countless hours of manual event entry and reduce errors. Consider the integrations currently offered, and if you don’t see one that’s important to you, reach out and ask. It could be that it’s on the roadmap or alert the team to the need for a future integration.

Building a future on the foundation of the past

The music industry's future is increasingly data-driven. Leveraging technologies like music business management software enables artists’ teams to store and recall historical campaign and event information, transforming raw data into actionable insights.

These insights not only inform immediate strategic decisions but also contribute to a long-term vision that anticipates shifts in consumer behavior and market dynamics. By embracing a data-driven culture, industry professionals can navigate the complexities of the market with greater confidence and precision. The future of music lies in understanding its past. Those who harness this power will lead the way in innovation and success.

All of your artists’ activities, events, data, and finances in one platform

We created AG Workspace because — as artists and industry professionals ourselves — we found the existing tools inadequate for the needs of our industry.

Try Workspace free to see what dedicated music business management software can do for your productivity, data organization, and decision-making.

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With 120,000 tracks published to streaming services every day, the work music marketing and promotion teams do to help their artists stand out is more vital than ever.

So to help you do more with the time and resources you have, we’re sharing 7 easy-to-implement time-management strategies for record label marketing and promotion teams.

1. Streamline your communications

Ever wonder how much time gets wasted due to poor communication?

Grammarly did, and what they found should concern any business leader… On average, poor communication costs every one of us 7.47 hours a week. Almost an entire day each week!

Equally concerning? Many of the tools created to help us could be hindering us.

Emails, calls, texts, and Slacks create a disjointed flow of information. Key details get lost in lengthy threads or miscommunicated in rushed messages. People forget what they talked about in meetings. The list goes on.

To prevent this, consider establishing dedicated Slack channels for specific projects (and setting ground rules for how they should be used), standardizing status updates, and sharing meeting summaries. (There are tons of AI tools that can transcribe and summarize meetings for you.)

Tools like Grammarly can also help ensure that the email or document you’re sending is clear and succinct.

Additionally, collaborative platforms can be a game-changer, allowing you to store all of your data in one place so nothing gets lost.

Artist Growth Workspace, for example, is an industry-specific events and project management platform that lets users:

Manage shared artist and roster calendars
Request and approve promo requests
Store notes, contracts, and other critical information
Request tickets, passes, and guest list access
Upload receipts to a shared financial ledger
Associate important contacts with events, such as streaming and radio

You can also access it while offline, ensuring that everyone is aligned around a single source of truth, whether or not they have an internet connection at the moment.

2. Rethink meetings

How many meetings have you attended that, as the saying goes, could have been an email?

If you said half, then you guessed correctly. Of the 31 hours on average that we spend in meetings each month, employees report feeling that half of that time was wasted.

Sure, there will always be times when a meeting or call is needed. But much of the time they’re just not necessary.

So what can you do?

For one, be selective about what optional meetings you attend. Ask yourself: Will anything relevant to my job be covered, or am I going just to be seen?

Or if you’re the one scheduling the call, consider whether it might be more effective conducted asynchronously. That is, via written updates.

And if a meeting is necessary? Be sure to share an agenda in advance. That way everyone has the opportunity to come prepared.

3. Centralize your artists’ events and data

Can you tell, at a glance, where your artists will be and what they’re doing? What about their data? Is it all in one place?

If not, you could be missing out on valuable opportunities for your artists. Not to mention, juggling multiple calendars, documents, and databases is a giant time suck and can lead to mistakes.

With dedicated record label management software, your entire team can access all of your artists’ activity, data, events, finances, and more in a single, permission-based system. (Meaning you control who can access and edit what information.)

Planning a radio campaign to coincide with an upcoming album release or tour? Or maybe you’re looking for opportunities to cross-promote artists with similar fan demographics?

Workspace can help you keep track of it all. You can even use it to request guest passes to your artists’ events with built-in workflows you won’t find in generic project management tools.

4. Manage distractions

Feel like you’re constantly being interrupted? According to a 2022 study by Next Work Innovation, you are! About 15 times an hour, in fact.

It's a recipe for reduced productivity, increased mistakes, and elevated stress.

You're not powerless, though! While you’ll never be able to prevent every interruption, you can rein them in by:

Checking your email only at set times each day
Evaluating whether you need to be in chat groups or email distribution lists
Blocking out time for specific tasks (more on that in a moment)
Resisting the temptation to reply to messages and emails right away
Setting time limits on apps you don’t use for work
Muting non-essential notifications

You may also want to try using a timer or productivity app.

One time management strategy, the Pomodoro technique, involves alternating 25-minute work sessions and five-minute breaks with longer breaks at certain intervals. However, there are many different time-based productivity strategies that can help maintain focus. Try a few to see what works for you.

5. Batch similar tasks

We mentioned blocking out time for specific tasks, but it’s worth taking a closer look at how batching similar tasks can increase your productivity and … happiness?

That's right, people who get more done are 52% more likely to report feeling like they had a good day at work.

By getting in the habit of lumping together similar tasks — responding to emails, conducting outreach, writing online ads, analyzing streaming data, etc. — even for short periods of time, you’ll find it easier to avoid what researchers call “goal switching.”

Basically, goal switching is when you jump from one task to another before completing the first, and it can cost a person up to 40% of their potential efficiency. In an eight-hour day, that’s just over three hours!

6. Templatize workflows and processes

Streamlining operations through templatization is another strategy that lends itself well to the marketing and promotion functions of a label.

For example, creating ready-made templates for press releases, pitch and marketing emails, and social media posts allows quick customization without the need to start over every time.

Just be careful to avoid overusing templates. For this reason, you should consider building a library of templates.

Likewise, applying standardized checklists and project plans to marketing and promotional activities ensures that all necessary steps are taken while minimizing time spent building project plans.

This is also an area where an industry-specific management tool like AG Workspace helps.

Workspace features built-in workflows for requesting and managing guest passes and tickets, as well as a dedicated promotions request workflow. Plus, you can create your own custom event schedule templates for streamlining the management and communication of activities and other events.

7. Look for new ways to leverage data

Data is crucial for every record label’s marketing and promotion departments.

While there’s certainly no shortage of tools for tracking and measuring marketing spend, ad efficacy, streaming data, and the like, historical performance and event data often gets overlooked.

By merging data from an artist’s past performances with that of a streaming and social data aggregator like Chartmetric, you might identify new opportunities or uncover unique insights about past campaigns.

Say one of your artists saw a significant uptick in streams in Detroit back in January 2023 but you’re not sure why. By filtering that artist’s past events in AG Workspace, you might find that the spike coincided with a certain in-studio performance and — what’s more — it had a outsized impact compared to similar events in other cities. From there, you could then develop and test a hypothesis about why that particular event yielded greater engagement with an artist’s music.

That’s just one example of how looking at data in new ways can yield powerful insights about prospective super fans.

It’s also essential that you continually evaluate data to refine your message and identify winning formulas. And AI can help. Due to its ability to identify patterns and other insights that us humans miss, AI tools like ChatGPT can be immensely valuable when it comes to analyzing your data. You’ll even find countless sample prompts to help you ask the right questions.

Just keep in mind that your organization may have rules regarding unvetted web tools. If in doubt, consult your organization’s policies.

Do more with Artist Growth Workspace

By implementing these 7 time-management tips, record label marketing and promotion teams can boost their efficiency, freeing up more time for creative and strategic tasks.

Try Workspace free to experience firsthand the difference an event and project management platform specially designed for the music industry makes for your organization.

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Organizational Efficiency

Harnessing the Power of Historical Data with Music Business Management Software