Technology continues to change the way music is consumed, and artists are learning clever ways to use technology to their benefit. Streaming services such as Spotify can supply data to artists, helping them see how fans listen to their music around the world. Even a band as huge as Metallica has begun using Spotify to their advantage, specifically using data to help build their setlists for the different cities they play.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek revealed the news during an earnings call last week. Ek told investors Metallica is using data to see what songs are popular in cities on their tour route. From there, Metallica builds a unique setlist to appeal to that particular city.
“You have an artist like Metallica, who changes their setlist on a city-by-city basis just by looking at Spotify data to see, which the most popular songs happened to be in that city,” Ek said during the earnings call. “We’ve never before been at a place in time where you could make as many informed decisions and understand your audience as well as we can do now as an artist.” 
With Spotify a huge resource for artists, we’d love to see EDM artists use Spotify data to diversify their sets based on the region. As much we love some artists, it’s disheartening to find out they play the same exact set night after night. It makes it hard to listen to an artist’s big festival set if it could be exactly the same as a local headline set in your city. And even though live EDM sets are built around more than an artist’s original productions, the sets could be diversified with data so that fans from each tour stop could get a unique experience.
We hope more artists follow in Metallica’s footsteps. Until then, you’ll have to go into DJ sets knowing you might have heard it all before.
H/T: Quartz
