Viberates Vasja Veber On Offering Premium Analytics To A Wider Audience And The ‘democratization Of Data
Vasja Weber and Matej Gregorcic were managing Slovenian superstar DJs UMEK when they realized they were in trouble.
They needed a data-driven platform that could measure the impact of various events such as album releases, tours or advertising campaigns on UMEK's operations.
But, as Weber explained, “We just couldn't find the tools to do the job for us.
So they created their own.
The management team of UMEK, Gregorcchi and Weber, along with UMEK himself (real name Uros Umek), set about developing the platform known today as Viberate .
Weber says the first version of Viberate only covers "about 2%" of what the company currently offers. A Slovenian music data company claims to be one of the world's top three music data analytics services.
“Initially, we didn’t have any plan, because it was just a tool for our department to work,” he said. But we soon realized we weren't the only ones in need of such a tool, so we upgraded our seed, quit management, and started working full-time at Viberate.
Founded eight years ago, the company has grown from 5 to 35 full-time employees and 120 external DBAs.
Viberate Analytics provides statistics for hundreds of thousands of artists, brands, venues, festivals and over 60 million songs. The company works with thousands of clients, including major record labels, independent record labels, digital service providers, distributors, advertisers and more.
In recent months, Viberate has expanded its services by launching an artist table for A&R teams that includes filters by genre, performance, fans, and geographic location.
The chart, according to Viberate, makes it easy to find new talent around the world. It's easy to use with streaming data and social media, and can be filtered by country, gender, and performance.
The company believes it has the potential to change how A&R teams define new businesses. “Just write down the required minimum number of listeners per month for an artist, and bam, you have a solid list of unsigned artists with a lot of effort from Spotify,” Weber explains.
The company recently launched a new platform , Viberate for Artists, for independent musicians.
Music Distribution offers all major streaming platforms, as well as booking and promotion tools, festival playlists and lineups, a free one-page tool, and professional artist analytics spanning broadcast channels and social media.
In addition, through the new interface, Viberate will provide financial support to independent musicians with up-front payments of up to $1 million in royalties for future releases.
Here, Weber gives us insight into the inner workings of Viberate, tells us more about the Viberate platform for artists , and offers his predictions for the future of the independent artist space…
In January, Viberate reduced the cost of the entire service from $129 to $9.90 per month. Why did you take this step and tell us about the results?
We want to provide premium analytics to a wider audience, not just large companies that can afford $129/month. Also, as you said, there are not many such services on the market, and we do not want users to change their current service to Viberate. Instead, we want to let them run Viberate on top of what they're already using.
We offer features that others don't and vice versa, so using multiple music analytics services will definitely give you better results and allow you to make decisions based on sound data.
However, paying a few hundred dollars a month is quite expensive, especially if you have a large group, so we decided to match our monthly price to an average streaming service subscription. And since everyone and their moms use Spotify or Apple Music, we figured that should be our price too. I announced the price cut in an interview at a music conference in front of 2,000 people, and my phone started receiving push notifications from Stripe before the interview was even over. This was to confirm our hypothesis as accurately as possible.
In May, Viberate announced a new list of artists filtered by genre, artist, fansite, and geographic location. Can you tell us more about what drives this scheme and who it is for?
A&R is a very common use case for Viberate and is done in the graphics department. With our filters it is very easy to find the best performers. To create your first filter, select "Main Genre" and then "Sub Genre". Then you start playing with performance filters, where you can ask our service to filter out the verified names that are in the account. For example, you can set the chart to not show the top 30,000 artists, which hides Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift from Zine World.
Then select your favorite channel, go to measurement and set the threshold. Let's say you go to Spotify often looking for interesting talent. Just enter the required minimum number of listeners per month for an artist and bam, and you will find yourself in the list of unsigned artists with a large number of Spotify members.
Undoubtedly, how many performers the service offers, but more importantly, what filtering and data integration the service provides, and here Viberate is a clear leader.
You'll start by looking at hundreds of thousands of artist profiles, but using a few filters, we'll narrow it down to a list of real musicians in the subcategory you're interested in. I often illustrate this by showing how to list up-and-coming techno artists and create a painting from less than a hundred pieces of art in less than a minute.
So you should check out their full analytic profiles to see who is the best fit for your brand or festival.
Viberate's extensive platform currently rates and reviews over 700,000 artists. Can you tell us more about the technology behind your platform?
We test over 4 million musicians but offer over 850,000 verified profiles. This means that our editors have checked your profile to make sure everything is in order. We don't just copy and paste a lot of information from anywhere and dump it on the platform because that can be disastrous. Instead, we allow artists and fans to add profiles to the service and then manually verify them. The process is a little slow, but the result is better.
When potential clients ask me what makes us different from the competition, the first thing I say is that we always have the cleanest data set.
Profile verification also means we only have one artist profile, so we make sure to include any information we have, like Jay-Z, in one profile. It often happens that when artists have multiple profiles (e.g. Jay-Z, JayZ, Jay Z), they sometimes have a feature with a different artist, and that feature is marked as a brand new artist, so statistics are not included in the feature. 'original. profile account. We will definitely correct all these data anomalies, which are mainly caused by the lack of proper qualifications.
Last month they launched Viberate for Artists to distribute music to major streaming platforms including Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Tencent Music. Why did you decide to launch this platform right now and what are your ambitions?
Distribution is only part of the puzzle. Viberate for Artists offers everything a DIY artist needs in one place for the price of an average do-it-yourself delivery service.
So at a price that artists currently pay just for distribution ($39/year), Viberate for Artists offers unlimited digital distribution, festival streaming tools and playlists, and personal websites automatically updated with pre-order forms. . Limited access to our analytics platform. We just added developments.
Viberate is also offering up to $1 million in royalties to independent artists for future releases through the hub. What is the outlook for the artist funding industry in the coming years and how does Viberate want to take its place in this space?
We didn't want to be just another service offering hacks because this segment already serves great services like Bitbread or Duty. Therefore, in the future, we plan to allow artists to create NFTs and provide them to their fans.
This means that artists don't sell their royalties, they just offer them as collateral for the money they earn anyway. Anyone who owns the token can redeem it by converting royalties into a predetermined amount of compensation.
Looking ahead: The main difference with NFTs is that in addition to allowing fans to fund the work of their favorite artists and earn money, the tokens are easily transferable, which means that if you want to liquidate your investment before the expiration date, you can do so. it is easy to sell the submitted token to someone else, or even to the original copyright holder, so that artists can redeem it whenever they want.
Let's say your favorite indie rock band wants to raise $10,000 by donating a few of their songs. You can buy $1,000 worth of tokens and get $1,300 over three years. But three months later, the song was on Spotify's main playlist, so its streams took off. You will see that you will get your investment back very soon, so you can wait or sell the token to someone else for a fraction of the cost.
What are the biggest challenges independent artists face today?
Separation is always a test. The only difference is that in the 80s you had to go play in a pub and hope to be noticed by a record company executive, but now you need to make sure your streaming and social stats are growing. our radar.
So I would argue that even knowing how to use statistics to your advantage can be a challenge. The artist market has been crowded for decades and it makes it very hard to stand out from the crowd and even if you manage to survive you still need someone to see you linger. This is where we enter.
Also, the lack of a manager can be a problem. You may be an independent artist, but it's still nice to have someone with experience taking care of you. I was surprised to see how many local rock bands there are in Ljubljana, where I live, who know the basics of the business, such as distribution and publishing. I spoke to a very popular band here and was surprised to find that they only have one album on Spotify and have no idea about the distributors.
When we finished our meeting, they gave me the last CD. I haven't opened it yet because I don't have a CD player anywhere, not even in my car. The DIY industry is growing fast, but I realized that there are a lot of "traditional" types who have been doing hair since the 90s and have been using this technology ever since.
What are your expectations for the independent artist space in the coming years?
If you want all the tools of this business to work in the past, then you need to get a proper account. Almost all tools are now available online for a small fixed fee. Until recently, the majors' biggest incentive has been their ability to sign big promotions. If you offered an 18-year-old boy $5 million to sing on Tik Tok, it would be hard for him to refuse you. . But even that has changed, and you can now prioritize an individual service based on your historical data.
I believe the DIY sector will continue to grow organically, it will be harder for artists to sign long-term contracts with major labels, and even established artists will forgo their major contracts and become independent again. Ray did just that, and she seems to be doing well.
I'm echoing an idea I borrowed from one of my LinkedIn contacts because it perfectly describes the threat that DIY services pose to traditional music giants. He said: “The labels have been active from the beginning and have worked with artists to build their careers. Right now they are waiting for the artists to do their work for them and then react by reaching an agreement.
Freedom is highly valued and you must own it. As services for independent artists have increased, prices have risen even more. Traditional players need to adapt and find new USPs in order to continue growing their business. Or maybe I'm saying this because big companies are the most difficult customers and I do my best to talk to them on the phone. Maybe that's part of the problem, who knows.
If you could change one thing about the music business, what would you change about the music business and why?
I'll make it less central. It is a global industry that employs billions of people around the world, but most companies are based in four cities: London, New York, Nashville and Los Angeles. 80% of the relevant conferences are held in the USA, which means that if you run a music startup in Central Europe, you will have to work hard to make it happen.
During the day we work in the office, and at night we call clients in America. Long flights and daunting crossings don't make life easy for us when we attend conferences in the US.
I think we need more community initiatives to build new music business centers, especially across Europe. The European Union should play a more prominent role here because I know that cultural development is a very important priority in Brussels and I think they are not addressing it properly.
Music business in the world
