David Emery Online

Luck and Magic

19 October 2013

Stats are dangerous.

You know how your parents would tell you off as a child if you tried to stick your fingers in a plug socket? Yeah, stats are like that.

There’s an obsession in certain parts of the music industry, particularly in digital marketing, with stats. Metrics. Percentage increases. Growth.

“Engagement”

Mostly this is like sticking a light bulb in your mouth, poking around the socket with a screwdriver and then flicking the “on” switch. You might think you’re going to get some illumination on the situation, but you really really don’t.

There are two key reasons why stats in the music industry are misleading to the point of self harm: luck and magic.

Firstly, then; luck. The tricky thing about how the whole music game works is that no one actually knows what they’re doing and why anything really happens. Sorry if this comes as a shock to anyone, I don’t mean it personally. It is true though. To break an artist there a million and one things that have to happen, most of which no one has any control over. You can certainly make it so those things don’t happen of course, and you can increase the chances that they do (a little), but you can’t actually force it.

My favourite example of this is Adele’s second record. Just how on earth did that sell so many copies? Well, I can exclusively reveal that it was solely down to…

Only joking.

There is, of course, no one reason, but a million little bits of luck that all added up into the perfect storm. In the UK, for example, late in the summer the year before it came out the most popular song for prospective X-Factor contestants to sing was ‘Make You Feel My Love’ from her first record. This song – strangely, looking back now – had never been a big hit when it was first released, but because of the bombardment of attention it received on mainstream TV it was transformed into a top 5 single.

Just at the point where the new album was being launched, she was propelled back into popular consciousness. There’s no way you could have predicted that, or engineered it. It was just luck, and that campaign was full of lucky breaks time and time again.

Every release has luck like that, in a smaller more everyday form. Luck that a live agent came to this week’s good gig, rather then last week’s stinker. Luck that a radio producer picked this track to play out rather then that track. Luck that a TV show had a last minute drop out so had a slot to fill.

Stats and data don’t know about luck.

They don’t know about magic either.

Magic is why marketing music isn’t quite like marketing anything else. Magic is why people will queue up to buy gig tickets overnight, or why one track can be on an advert and sell loads of records, where another does not. Without getting too hippy about it, music resonates with the soul in a way that transcends traditional commercial reasoning. It moves people in big ways and little ways, in subtle ways and life changing ways.

Posting an image of whatever to Facebook because it gets better reach then a link to an interesting interview misses the point. It misses the opportunity for magic, and the opportunities for luck that magic creates.

Clicking from a banner ad directly to iTunes because it reduces the amount of steps from view to purchase misses the point because it too misses the opportunity for magic. Who sees an advert and there and then thinks “I must buy this right now”? Whereas if you aid people in discovering the music, in getting deeper into it then the magic will do the rest.

Digital stats often miss that music is not a closed system. Buying from iTunes or Amazon is not the only option. If you see a pre-roll on YouTube and the next day walk into Rough Trade and buy an LP where, exactly, is your conversion data? Or see a tweet and then open up Spotify?

This is not to say that all of this data is useless, just that it is significantly unrepresentative of what is actually happening. Don’t let them lead you, or be your decision maker, because as solid and analytical and smart as they might seem, they are only a small window onto a tiny world.

Stats are dangerous. Make sure they don’t mean you lose the magic and miss the luck.