Universal Music Group Is Looking For New Ways To Make Money Off Big Hip-Hop Artists

Ever since file sharing killed record sales, the music industry has been scrambling for new ways to make revenue off artists and their music. With social media use at an all-time high, record labels are using data mining technology to track every Tweet, "Like," Spotify play, YouTube play; all those clicks are used to track what artists are being talked about and how to market them accordingly. Earlier today, juggernaut label Universal Music announced its partnership with French branding company, Havas, and the launch of Global Music Data Alliance, a new initiative to find new revenue streams through branding from the massive amounts of data they have acquired.

While all the details of the partnership are still vague, Lucian Grange, the CEO of Universal Music Group, said in a statement, "We want to continue to find new revenue and marketing opportunities for all of our artists by...supercharging our efforts to realize previously untapped revenues from consumer brands and other new business partners."

The Global Music Data Alliance will look to take the data mining practices of media companies like BigChampagne and Shazam a step further by investing in "data scientists and algorithm experts" to expand artists' reach and exposure. "We will have so much data that we can leverage for the purpose of better understanding the consumer and creating better experiences," said Dominique Delport, Havas' global managing director. "There is so much to invent."

[Ad Age]
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