Musicians, have you ever wanted to know just who your biggest die-hard fans are? I’m sure you’ve seen yourselves all over the more vocal ones’ social media feeds, and you can’t even count the number of times a certain few hit you with Twitter mentions daily. But now with Spotify’s “Fan Insights” you’ve got the hard data to see who your actual biggest fans really are!
The tool right now is available in limited beta on desktop computers, but there’s a basic mobile version also available for the curious with a full-scale rollout most likely taking place in the coming months. The tool’s dashboard gives artists an overview of their main statistics: number of Spotify listeners, how those listeners break down by gender, age, and location.
Listeners are divided into further subcategories based on how many times they listen. ‘Fans’ are people who have listened to a select artist several times in the past few months and have saved their music to their personal collections. Up one level, we have ‘streakers’ – ‘streakers’ have listened to the artist every day in the last week. Following that there are ‘loyalists’, who have listened to the artist more than any others, and finally there are ‘regulars’ who have listened to the artist at least once a day for most of the past month. 
Spotify’s VP of Product Charlie Hellman walked through the tool with Music Ally who told us that, “in our interactions with artists and managers, getting a handle on fans and superfans in particular was a really high priority for them. Those fans and superfans have a disproportionate impact on revenue: they’re the people who’ll buy tickets, VIP packages, merchandise and will be the social evangelists for the band.”
Fan Insights also aims to get artists and their managers to think in terms of listeners, and not streams. Head of Artist Services at Spotify Mark Williamson states that, “the problem with ‘streams’ is that they go up almost no matter what happens: as Spotify adds millions more users, streams go up…What’s useful with ‘listeners’ is that they are the context of real people – real sets of ears – as opposed to what can be an abstract context of millions of streams. Listeners gives [sic] you a sense of your actual fans out there.”
H/T: Fact Mag | Featured Image Source: Tech Crunch
