Apple Music has unveiled an upgrade to its Artist Analytics dashboard, providing artists with insights into their radio play.
The platform now monitors over 40,000 radio stations globally, offering artists a comprehensive view of their airplay worldwide. The new feature leverages Apple’s Shazam music-recognition technology, making ‘Radio Spins’ a key metric within the dashboard, Apple Music said on a FAQ page.
The new feature allows artists to see detailed breakdowns of their radio plays. Data is segmented by song, station, and geographic location, providing a clear view of which tracks are receiving the most airplay. This radio play data is integrated into the ‘Trends’ tab of the artist analytics, which is updated daily.
The ‘Places’ page, meanwhile, allows artists to see where their music is being played globally, helping them identify potential markets and plan tours.
In addition to Radio Spins, Apple Music for Artists now offers several performance metrics to help artists gauge their success and plan their strategies. ‘Plays’ are recorded when song playbacks last more than 30 seconds, including those from Apple Music radio stations.
The ‘Listening Now’ metric shows the number of fans who are actively playing an artist’s music, excluding offline plays. By selecting the widget, artists can dive into detailed trends from the past 48 hours, including the maximum number of listeners and average listeners during that period. Top six most played songs are also featured under ‘Top Songs Now’.
The dashboard also shows ‘Average Daily Listeners,’ or the average number of unique listeners per day over a selected timeframe; ‘Purchases,’ which tracks sales of songs and albums from the iTunes Store; ‘Shazams,’ which log each time a song is identified by the Shazam app or partner applications; ‘Milestones’ that highlight significant achievements, such as top plays, top Shazams; additions to Apple Music editorial playlists; and ‘Video Views,’ which count views of music videos longer than 30 seconds on Apple Music.
Apple Music emphasizes that the data provided is intended to offer “performance-level data” and should not be used for financial or royalty inquiries.
Apple Music launched its Apple Music For Artists platform in 2019 to rival the Spotify For Artists app launched in 2017.
Earlier this year, Apple Music rolled out its Partner Program offering various tools for Apple Music’s partners to track trends on its streaming service as well as global radio plays using Shazam technology.
The upgrade to the analytics platform came shortly after Apple launched a global weekly chart dedicated to classical music. The Apple Classical Top 100 chart, which leverages data from Apple Music Classical streams, Apple Music streams, iTunes downloads, iTunes song sales, and Shazam tags across 165 countries, provides a list of the most popular classical albums worldwide.
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