140. Predicting Hits … Before They Hit.
Daniel Johannsen
November 5, 2020
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People often like to think that art and music are things that are distinctly human, personal and ultimately, not predictable. We don’t like thinking that a machine knows us better than we know ourselves or that our own tastes are something that can be boiled down and predicted.
FuturePulse is working to create a technology platform that does just that. It’s a EU backed project that’s working to accurately predict trends on social media and streaming platforms.
Today we’re speaking with Daniel Johansson, a researcher and analyst at the Linnaeus University in Sweden as well as at the Spotify-backed company Soundtrack Your Brand.
We’re going to be talking to him about FuturePulse and what it takes to predict a hit … before it happens.
Topics include:
How the ambitious FuturePulse effort came into being.
The progress they’ve already made toward their goal of predicting success … 12 weeks out.
How project stakeholders can leverage trends and leading indicators and why the algorithm they’ve created is open to everyone.
How predictive popularity is different from trend identification.
How Sountrack Your Brand and B2B music use relates to FuturePulse’s consumer findings.
Daniel Johansson is a researcher and analyst at the Linnaeus University in Sweden as well as at the Spotify-backed company Soundtrack Your Brand, which he represents in FuturePulse. His research is focused on the music industrial economy and organization as well as business economics within the music industry, with a strong focus on streaming and digital distribution. He has a tech background, as a research engineer in computer science at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, as well as working at tech companies in the music industry. He does analyses and writes articles for the music industry news agency www.musikindustrin.se, and does consultancy work for different actors in the music industry. He also plays the guitar like a wiz and occasionally writes a song or two.
Soundtrack Your Brand is a Spotify-backed company founded in 2013 on a mission to kill bad background music. Headquartered in downtown Stockholm, with offices in UK and USA, we’ve spent the last couple of years building the world’s best music streaming service for retail stores and other public establishments. Our state-of the-art music platform and our scientifically proven music curation model are crafted by connoisseurs and perfected with technology. In FuturePulse we are functioning as one of three use cases and as a test bed for the technology being developed in the project.
FuturePulse is a project designed to help music companies leverage a variety of music data and content, ranging from broadcasters (TV, radio) and music streaming data, to sales statistics and streams of music-focused social media discussions, interactions and content, through sophisticated analytics and predictive modeling services to make highly informed business decisions, to better understand their audience and the music trends of the future, and ultimately to make music distribution more effective and profitable.
FuturePulse offers these capabilities over a user-friendly, highly intuitive and visual web solution that enables the immersion of music professionals in the realm of music data, and will support them to make highly informed and effective business decisions.
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