Spotify Offering New Analytics To Publishers

While artists have long felt that they’re not making enough from streaming, songwriters and publishers have it even worse, making as little as a tenth per stream as that of an artist. Although the rates may not change, Spotify is at least attempting to provide more info to publishers to help them understand their payouts better by launching its new Publishing Analytics platform.

Spotify Publishing Analytics “will give publishers daily streaming statistics for the works and recordings they have identified, including playlist performance, as well as the ability to view data for each of the songwriters on their roster,” according to the official announcement. The program is said to have been created in a close collaboration with publishers to determine exactly what their data needs are.

The platform provides global analytics of daily streams by song, songwriter and recording, playlist data, and covers, remix and ISRC data. There’s also a way to export metadata for later analysis and archiving. Access to the application to join the limited beta of Publishing Analytics can be found here.

The official announcement ends with the caveat, “Right now we’re focused on providing publishers with this valuable data — Spotify Publishing Analytics won’t change anything about how publishing royalties are accounted or paid.” Although money is always better, at least having improved data on streams will allow publishers to check and verify royalty payments, and probably also help assuage disgruntled songwriters who complain that they’re royalties are too low.

With the new Music Modernization Act now in place, Spotify wants to be seen as proactive in helping artists and songwriters, so the new data platform is a way of getting out in front of the curve, so to speak. The company knows that there are many licensing battles ahead and better data can be a key to taming the negotiations at least a little.