Welcome to Music Data Pro. Chuck Fishman here - this site is dedicated to my in depth writing about music marketing - specifically marketing musical artists on streaming services, streaming and radio analytics, and music metadata.

You can read about my experience in the music business and music technology on my bio page. Briefly, I’m an active musician (FSQ), work in artist management (on George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic team). I provide music tech infrastructure to the industry via my business development and partnership work ; with experience at Cisco, Acquia, Official.fm and most recently Gracenote / Nielsen.

Main series of music tech writing follows - thanks for reading

Don’t Split The Streams - Chuck’s ongoing blog series about maximizing stream counts and download sales on specific streaming services and retailers such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Beatport, Traxsource etc.

NEW - Don’t Split The Streams - Part 6 (click here) - Searching for consolidated, purposeful, actionable streaming music data - What streaming and sales data is available that consolidates the consumption of an artist’s music across platforms?

Overview of the “Don’t Split The Streams” (click here) - Seven Reasons to Focus Music Marketing on Specific Streaming + Retail Platforms

Don’t Split The Streams Archive - Parts 1-4

Part 1 (click here) - How marketing arrangements with major streaming services and music retailers drive artists’ choices about where to deliver their music. And a detailed look at how music retailers Traxsource, Beatport and Juno Download allow dance music producers to market their tracks.

Part 2 (click here) - What do the music metadata fields “remix artist” and “featured artist” mean with respect to stream counts. The differences in how Spotify and Apple Music count song streams based on music metadata. And a detailed look at Spotify for Artists and Apple Music for Artists and the artist analytics they offer for musicians and their management teams.

Part 3 (click here) - How musicians should size up their streaming performance against other artists’ results. How does an artist get to one million streams on Spotify?

Part 4 (click here) - An in depth look at Spotify’s annual stats review “Spotify Wrapped for Artists” and how to make sense of the analytics using 3rd party data sets from Apple Music for Artists / Shazam, Soundcharts, Chartmetric, and WARM Airplay. Plus understand important Spotify engagement stats like “streams to listeners” or “monthly listeners to followers”.

Organize your music metadata in 30 minutes by Chuck Fishman

1. Learn how music services credit you and the musicians involved in making songs you release for streaming.

2. Organize music metadata for delivery to digital distributors so that your music properly displays credit data.

This exercise is designed for independent music artists as part of Bas Grasmeyer and Carlo Kiksen’s 30 day Artist Lockdown Challenge, a free digital strategy crash course for musicians at all stages of their career. Click here to review your music metadata.

Focusrite Guide to Releasing Music by Chuck Fishman

Chuck’s four part guide on how artists should think about releasing their music - presented by music equipment maker Focusrite.

Part 1 - Preparing your music for releasing : proper mixing and choosing a mastering agent, service or software

Part 2 - Copyrighting your songs, clearing samples, and pitching your final music product to record labels

Part 3 - Registering as a songwriter, and negotiating terms with a record label if you’ve been offered a deal (to be published)

NEW - Part 4 - No Record Deal? How to self release with a digital music distributor and preparing the metadata necessary for your release?

A Producer Online APO PODCAST by Clarian North featuring Chuck Fishman on The Focusrite Guide to Releasing Music, plus music producer Lee Curtiss

Page 2 - More on music metadata, music stream counts, mapping radio airplay’s impact on streaming →