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Written by Ramsey Brown.
Whether you are a signed artist or in the early development stages of your music career, understanding your audience and measuring your growth is an essential part of success in today’s industry. Luckily with advancements in technology and new websites emerging almost every day, understanding statistics and data has never been easier.
Companies such as Soundcharts have developed in order to improve artists' workflow and decision making process through providing hard data and analytics regarding radio play, social media, audience demographics, competition, and more. In such a competitive industry, this information is crucial in order to stay ahead of the competition and get a detailed view of your career progress.
There are a ton of music analytics tools and companies out there who claim to provide insight on statistics and track your productivity on various platforms, so what makes Soundcharts different from the rest? Well, that’s what we are here to tell you. If you are looking into a music analytic company to help you understand your performance and advance your overall music career — congratulations, because you are already a step ahead of those who are not doing this.
Truth of the matter, the world and specifically the music industry is becoming more digitized by the minute and it’s important to keep up with these faced paced changes in order to not fall behind.
We’re going to discuss what exactly Soundcharts is, what all features they offer, why it’s beneficial for artists and other music entities to use, pros and cons of the company, and how it stands against its competitors in the music data market.
Soundcharts is designed for artists, record labels, and music publishing companies with the mission to organize the world's music information and make it universally accessible and actionable. It is a competitive intelligence solution that helps discover new songs and artists on radio and platform charts.
Soundcharts costs a total of $21.55 USD per month and has no free version but it does support a free trial for ease of access and better understanding of the software so that your payment does not go to waste.
You may be wondering, why Soundcharts if there are other similar companies out there that have similar features and produce similar results? Well, we’re going to dive into some of their most prominent features so you can make that decision for yourself.
As we all have come to know, social media is arguably the most important place to market yourself as an artist. From Facebook, Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, and just about anything else in between, you are able to see a complete data overview of how yourself, your competitors, or any other artists on these platforms are performing and get a monitor in real time how they became successful or what they are doing to increase their followers, likes, and plays.
With this feature, you are able to see the social channels that are most active with easy to read charts listing your most popular platforms from top to bottom. This is important for when you are deciding to run an advertising campaign or put money into any sort of social media marketing initiative, because you’ll then know where you are performing the best and where you should begin pushing harder to reach fans.
Graphs are provided that show historical growth and also daily inflation. You can view any sort of boost in yours or your competitors' social outreach based on what they did and what happened to cause their inflation. This is useful for seeing if your posts are actually resonating with your followers and if they are or are not, you’ll understand exactly why and how to conduct your posts or campaigns in the future.
While Spotify for Artists and Apple Music for Artists will give you an insight on your performance on their platforms, it doesn’t provide you with a comparison to other platforms or give you a benchmark of other songs and artists outside of your personal roster. These comparisons are great for not only monitoring your own social media growth, but monitoring your biggest competitors as well.
Although digital radio and streaming has undoubtedly become a force to be reckoned with in today’s industry, many music business professionals will tell you that radio is still a very important factor and it is important for artists to not brush off the significance of air play on the radio.
With Soundcharts’ radio airplay monitoring feature, artists can track their real-time radio airplay spins on AM and FM stations across the world. This allows artists, managers, record labels and more to highlight local opportunities, optimize radio promotion strategies and discover emerging talent with powerful airplay analytics. You are also able to browse the global radio airplay charts to find out today's top radio songs to give yet another comparison to how your music is performing to others.
Soundcharts tracks 1,800 different radio stations in over 70 countries and allows you access to a world heat-map to analyze where exactly you are being listened to the most. This tool comes in handy when you are looking to partner with commercial radio stations and shows you where exactly you should be targeting your advertising campaigns.
Beyond this, many artists are being played on the radio and listened to in places they often didn’t even know their music was relevant in. Therefore, your music could be earning royalties in countries that you are not collecting for. Now, artists can become aware of where exactly their music is played, what stations, how many spins it has, so that they can take the proper steps to earn their royalty money from it.
Soundcharts monitors 25k+ song and album charts across 247 countries — from Spotify Global Top-200 and Apple Music Alternative in Fiji to Instagram Stories and TikTok Charts. Relative rankings are often more insightful than the absolute figures. That’s why the music charts are still at the forefront of the music business. Now artists can access all major digital charts in one place so they can identify the most popular type of music and understand real time consumption trends.
TikTok and Instagram have undoubtedly changed the way people find, hear, and consume new music. With this feature, artists are able to stay on top of the latest trends and know where the most popular platforms are for new releases.
You are also able to monitor a charts history to see when you or other artists hit the charts, when and why you climbed or fell on the charts, where your main fans are that got you on the charts, plus much more. With Soundcharts alerts and notifications, you will never miss a chart entry or a new peak or trend in the market.
With streaming being so prominent in today’s music consumption world, it’s incredibly important for artists to understand their performance on the most popular playlists and track how exactly they are reaching followers and listeners through these .
Curated, algorithmic and user-created playlists offer a way for musicians to reach new audiences, boost streams, get more followers and grow their career. With Soundcharts you can study an artist’s presence on the playlists across all major streaming services so you can make better decisions when it comes to , release strategies, and how to engage with fans.
Soundcharts monitors over 9 million playlists on 5 of the most popular streaming platforms so you can track your overall volume and exposure on each playlist. If you release a lot of music, it can be difficult to decide which songs you should pitch to a certain playlists. Now with Soundcharts playlists monitoring feature, you can see which of your songs are performing the best on what types of playlists in order to make more strategic moves moving forward.
If you are an artist, manager, music producer, songwriter, A&R, talent buyer, or any position at a record label, Soundcharts can be an extremely helpful tool for success because it shows leading statistics of how music is performing in almost all aspects of the music industry.
New artists and trends arise daily and now with Soundcharts, anyone can track their own or others behavior on different social media platforms, charts, radio, and playlists. This helps keep accurate tabs on your preferred artists so you can follow their overall growth and improve your personal decision making or make better decisions for the future growth and development of your career or business
Soundcharts is a very easy to use tool for its various features mentioned above, plus ones that we didn’t fully discuss. You can keep track of yourself as an artist and compare your growth to your competitors by easily tracking insights and data to manage your overall growth on various platforms.
With the charts rankings and playlist exposure features, it can also help you take a more streamlined approach to advertising and marketing decisions rather than randomly hitting heads to get things done after many failed attempts.
Furthermore, this software provides you with accurate and detailed information through extremely advanced technology. You will never be kept in the dark when it comes to trends, performance, or audience outreach. They refresh the data constantly and cover hundreds of different sources so all of the knowledge you will ever need will always be available in one place.
Another pro to Soundcharts is that it does offer a free limited time trial. This is great for anyone who doesn’t completely understand how the app works and doesn’t want to commit to purchasing the service without trying it out first.
Although it provides accurate insights about many artists based on different countries, there are countries that are out of the scope of these statistics. So for those living in those specific countries, it may not be a great tool to use depending on what region of the world they are in.
Secondly you are limited to only 10 artists for the artist benchmark feature. To increase it to more than 10 artists it requires you to purchase the premium version —which is very costly considering the features it provides. It also restricts features without the premium version, like advanced A&R, API, or chart alerts, which can be a basic daily essential for some people depending on what type of business you are conducting.
To clearly know the scope and many other tendencies of a software, it is helpful to compare the software with other software on the market that provides similar features.
We are going to provide a brief comparison of Soundcharts with all the similar software online so you don't have to go through all the hassle of researching and comparing for yourself.
Chartmetric gathers music and craftsman related information from different sources like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Bandsintown, Spotify, and Youtube, and presents this to specialists and music experts so they can gauge their presentation and make moves to expand streaming incomes.
Chartmetric is available on the apple app store and google play store and also supported on any sort of PC. Soundcharts however is not available as a smartphone app and is only supported on desktop computers and PCs.
Chartmetric just like Soundcharts is a music promotion app and provides "Music Analytics Driven By Data Science" as said by them on their website so it is specifically targeted by music professionals like Soundcharts.
Both platforms provide training via documentation but Soundcharts perform live online sessions and in person training too while Chartmetrics provides tutorial videos and also provide training through webinars.
The price evaluation of both the platforms are really far apart. While Soundcharts only costs $21.55 a month, Chartmetric's premium subscription costs a total of $140.00 a month with a yearly subscription through which you can save upto $280.00 in total. Unlike Soundcharts, Chartmetrics has a free version that is also very effective for use and also supports a free trial over its paid subscriptions.
Both Soundcharts and Charmetrics are great options for tracking online music analytics, but the best option is based on your personal preference and what exactly you are wanting to get out of the platform.
Again, Soundcharts is a desktop-oriented software that currently does not offer an app download option. It’s other competitor, eClincher, is supported by both apps and PC use.
The targeted audience for Soundcharts is only music professionals while the targeted audience for eClincher is all small and medium sized businesses, social media professionals and also marketing agencies.
Both platforms provide online customer support but unlike Soundcharts, eClincher provides business hours and also 24/7 live customer support. While both the platforms provide training through documentation, live online sessions and in person training but eClincher provides training through webinars too.
As far as pricing is concerned, eClincher is fairly expensive and costs $59 per month and just like Soundcharts, it does not support any free version but has a free trial version.
Soundcharts is an essential data analysis tool that any musician or music representative can really benefit from using. With it’s science driven and high quality statistics, you will be able to see and understand the growth of your music on social media, playlists, radio, and more. Understanding your audience and online interaction has never been more important in today’s highly digital industry.
It has also never been easier to access such data with advanced websites and technology such as Soundcharts. If you are a musician who is serious about growing your popularity and career, I highly recommend you try out Soundcharts and all the ways it can help you develop and advance as an artist.
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