Tools: Viberate. The all-in-one platform for growing your music career

With so much analytic data for artists and their teams to chew over, their challenge is digesting this data in a way that delivers insight and helps grow an artist’s career. Viberate provides a comprehensive and versatile ecosystem of analytics for artists, labels and promoters alike, with a blend of features similar to those offered by Chartmetric, Jaxsta and Rostr – with an emphasis on using big data to provide visually appealing and in-depth insight.

Viberate allows users to claim profiles – whether they are artists, venues, or festivals. They, and other industry professionals, can then access in-depth analytics of their profiles – as well as those of their competitors, plus of various genres and markets.

CBDO Vasja Veber has a background in artist management, having managed techno DJ UMEK – who is also Viberate’s co-founder – for a decade. A few years ago, seeking to understand the impact of paid advertising, they launched topdjs. com, which tracked the followers and likes DJs received. A $1m angel funding round followed, and the company was renamed Viberate to signal their focus on building a new database for all kinds of musicians. The platform now analyses roughly 1b data points at any given moment.

An artist profile features key information about an artist’s genre, the cities they’re most popular in, their top content, and more. An analytics tab provides more detail about an artist’s fanbase, audience, events, network, music, and content.

The data is split across a few interesting metrics. Users are given an evaluation of an artist’s “Career Health,” measured by social media performance, music channel performance, and “Network Respect” – based on the number and popularity of the artists who follow them. An artist’s “Career Performance” is a 12-month timeline, highlighting content that performed extremely well: a YouTube video, a Twitter post, or a song with a high number of Shazams.

The size of an artist’s fanbase across digital platforms can be seen in “Total Fanbase Distribution”, helping artist teams spot under-performing platforms, understand which channels work best for certain genres, and diversify their online presence. Weekly fanbase growth can be tracked, with platform-specific graphs showing how followers have developed over time, allowing users to connect activations like tours and TV appearances to fan growth. A “Fanbase vs. Engagement” metric helps users uncover truly effective campaign elements and identify if fake followers are muddying the water.

Promoters and booking agents who are looking ahead to the resumption of the live business will be interested in the Monthly Audience Map, which pulls in Spotify and YouTube data to rank an artist’s audience size per country, showing where, for instance, it makes sense to book them. Viberate also gets data from event aggregators and ticketers and delivers data on an artist’s gigging experience: average crowd size, venues they play, and which countries they play most. Separate venue and festival pages give insight into the artists they book.

This is all useful for managers, too – they can investigate other artists to set goals and plan future shows or festival bookings. An artist’s peer network – the other artists that are following them – can be a good indication of an artist’s momentum, and Viberate tracks this per platform, with a ranking of artists by popularity. Users can see on which platforms they’re followed by peers – and if they’ve followed back yet.

This is useful for artists to track their network and to establish relationships with artist-fans – it could even be a source of successful collaborations.

These “career health” features are useful, says Veber, for spotting undiscovered rising artists: “hot artists that have ‘good’ socials and ‘good’ music but a ‘poor’ network… are doing everything right but probably haven’t been picked up by the industry yet.”

An artist’s Instagram and Twitter content performance is measured, comparing each month’s post performance. Artists are also grouped by similar fanbase size, allowing benchmarking and comparison of an artist’s engagement rate with that of artists in the same cluster. It’s a quick finger-on-the-pulse check to see whether you need to put in effort to improve engagement.

Another way to leverage these features is to explore profiles of rising artists and identify what has made them more popular, offering learnings on content strategy and posting practices.

Users can segment countries too, displaying the most popular genres on music charts, the hottest artists, info on the biggest festivals, top venues, each week’s buzzing videos, streaming charts, Shazam charts, and more. The most important music cities are analysed, and users can find the fastest-rising local artists, event distribution by genre, and a rank of cities by event density.

Artists looking to expand into a new market will find this useful to make informed marketing decisions, and as a search tool for festivals and venues for when touring resumes – where hopefully a new audience will await after some effective marketing.

These individual metrics are complemented by Viberate’s charts, updated daily and pulling in data from various social and music channels.

Users can customise charts by country, genre, and specific metrics – like Instagram followers, YouTube subscribers, or Spotify followers – and a timeframe. For example, you could look into “top rock artists in Finland by Spotify followers in the last 90 days”. A ‘Viberate Popularity’ tool measures an artist’s performance across platforms (comparable to Chartmetric’s ‘Cross Platform Performance’ metric).

Viberate’s ambition is big: to become a music industry data standard like IMDb is for movies, and they are preparing to raise a series A funding round in 2021.

So where does Viberate fit amongst its competitors? While Chartmetric features data from more platforms, Viberate does make these analytics very visually accessible. Adding metadata and an industry directory (as on Jaxsta and Rostr) to its list of upcoming features would be a helpful step, and more features are coming: airplay data arrives soon, along with analysis of playlists from different streaming services.

One of Viberate’s really unique aspects is how it integrates live performance data into overall social and streaming analytics – data that is usually siloed. It’s easy to see why, post-pandemic, Viberate hopes to be used widely across the live sector.

It’s free to set up an account on Viberate and claim a profile, and free users can see the Top 50 artist chart, essential artist analytics, and analytics of top 50 artists. Pricing tiers are €10.90, €41.90 and €82.90 per month, each giving access to additional features. Vibrate’s biggest clients are labels and management companies, with all three major labels having tested the platform.