Streaming services are starting to find new ways to help artists and labels reach fans. The week after Pandora acquired ticketing service Ticketfly, subscription service Deezer announced a partnership with BandPage that will help fans get deals for merchandise, special events and other items offered directly by artists.
BandPage is a hub that connects dozens of commercial partners with digital services with more than 500,000 artists posting tour dates, photos and offers for everything from merchandise to VIP experiences on their profiles. (The service takes a 10 percent cut of any sales through its platform.) Under the new deal, BandPage will send push notifications to listeners based on its analysis of Deezer’s streaming activity. The goal is to connect the right offer with the right listener.
“Listening data is one of the most incredible dictators in interest in engaging with an artist’s content,” BandPage CEO J Sider told Billboard.
While creators and rights holders aren’t likely to consider BandPage revenue as a replacement for royalties, there’s a common perception in the music industry that streaming services should do more to help artists. Even though royalty rates may not change much, services can take steps to create a bridge from artists to their fans — a commonality between this deal and Pandora’s $450 million acquisition of Ticketfly. With Pandora’s roughly 80 million monthly listeners, it plans to use Ticketfly to more seamlessly integrate artists’ targeted audio messages to fans with a ticketing platform. In a similar way, Deezer and Rhapsody use BandPage to help artists reach their biggest fans where they listen to music online.
BandPage claims to have had success with its existing partnership with subscription service Rhapsody. Its analysis of Rhapsody listening data has helped its targeted push notifications achieve a click-through rate double that of Google search advertisements and 10 times Facebook advertisements. Across all partners, BandPage says it now sends more than 1.5 million fans to musicians’ stores every month.
Now Deezer is working with the San Francisco-based company to better serve both artists and fans. Deezer, one of the largest music subscription services, claims to have more than six million subscribers and 16 million monthly listeners. Its actual reach may be smaller, however. The company’s IPO prospectus revealed 2.5 million subscribers, or 40.2 percent of the total, did not generate revenue as of June 30. In any case, Deezer should be able to connect artists to a large number of avid listeners.
It makes sense for streaming services to create a better link between creators and listeners. With BandPage’s insight into traffic to artists’ websites and Facebook pages, Sider says there has been “a major shift” in how consumers learn about and connect with artists. “They’re spending far more time on streaming services. They’re going there first.”
