Scoopity Data: How Kanye’s Latest Troll May Have Been a Masterpiece in Data Collection
This article was originally published in May 2018.
On April 27th, Kanye West tweeted to his 28 million followers: “lift yourself”, followed by a link to his website. There, an embedded mp3 titled “LIFT YOURSELF MASTER…” sat available for free streaming. The song? A sample of Amnesty’s 1973 hit Liberty over which Kanye rambles “poopity scoop, scoopity poop…”.
Nice troll, Yeezy.
On the surface, this seems just another rickroll from the king of controversy marketing himself. But considered in context of the crippling closed-door data sharing policies enacted by streaming services, Kanye’s troll might just be a power play in gathering valuable information about his listeners.
How? The answer lies in Google’s freemium Google Analytics, an embeddable piece of code that provides website owners information about their visitors. Information Google Analytics provides about site visitors includes where they’re from, how they found the site, how long they stayed, and who came back, to scratch the surface.
By releasing Lift Yourself exclusively on his website, Kanye drove millions of listeners onto his own platform, and away from the streaming services who remain coy about sharing listener data with artists and labels.
In most other industries, access to this type of information is a given. When customers shop either in-store or online at J. Crew, for example, they provide a range of personal information to the retailer including contact info, age and gender, and style preferences. J. Crew uses this information to tailor a more personalized experience for shoppers through value-add features such as email notifications on sales, related products, customer loyalty programs, and so on.
For the most part, the transfer of basic customer data, like in the example above, is beneficial for all parties: sellers improve customer acquisition and retention rates, and customers gain an accessible, personally curated path to purchase their favorite products.
When fans stream music en masse, DSPs accumulate a similar data set on listeners, and use it to formulate tailored playlists and recommendations based on those user’s music preferences, but that’s as far as it goes. The artists, the labels — the content creators and rights holders who actually own the music — are denied access to actionable data, fed only generic insights on fan engagement, including an artist’s number of monthly listeners and top cities by followers.
This is a pressing problem in the music industry, because artists don’t know who their most valuable fans are. When Drake looks at his Spotify for Artists, for example, he can’t decipher the superfan — the kid who’s streamed God’s Plan 1,000 times, bought every last memorabilia, and dished on VIP meet-and-greet tickets — from a group of 1,000 people who heard his song on Spotify’s Rap Caviar playlist once. And that means that finding a product-market fit, even for the most successful artists in today’s landscape, is still a crapshoot.
Music tech firms like United Masters are trying to solve this very problem (with help from $70m in funding from Alphabet, Inc. no less). But Kanye may have just beaten them to it. By driving listeners direct-to-website, Kanye gained first-party access to listener data normally exclusive to DSPs. And you can bet that this data will come in use when he begins promoting his new album, marketing his new line of Yeezy merch, and mapping his world tour.
Mindless troll, or data genius? (Probably the first, but still.)