The ready availability of data has changed music. For most of music history, few had access to the numbers, which meant they were prone to manipulation. The rise of streaming in the past 18 years—let’s date it to 2006, when YouTube exploded—brought with it a mind-boggling amount of information about what gets consumed, and by whom. Harnessing that data and helping people make sense of it is what Chartmetric does. The platform, founded in 2016, tracks data from streaming platforms and sources that pertain to radio, concerts, videos, and much more. They also run a highly informative blog—where Third Bridge Creative contributors have a regular presence—that tells stories around music and data. We recently caught up with Chartmetric President and COO Andreas Katsambas to discuss how data has changed the music landscape, how AI might impact music’s future, and what we can glean from the site’s recent year-end report. 

‍Let’s start with your history in the music business. 

My first job out of school was at a marketing firm on Sunset Boulevard, right by the Sunset Strip.  After work, I would go to shows—Whiskey, Troubadour, Kick Club—which was amazing. Not being familiar with the music industry or how things worked, I was surprised to see bands loading their own equipment and working the merch booth. I started helping some of these artists out: maybe doing some flyers, trying to get them into fanzines. At one point I thought, let's just make some cassettes and CDs and see if we can sell them. After a while, I quit my day job and started a small label called The End Records. It took about two years, but I ended up signing with Red Distribution, which is now part of The Orchard. 

That's when things really started growing. But [soon after] you had the decimation of retail, especially the chains. Tower went bankrupt. Streaming was still coming up; iTunes wasn't paying as much as before. At one point, I got a call from BMG, and they made me an offer to join them and bring my label into their company. I was tired of doing this by myself, so [in 2016], I joined BMG and changed my scope. 

I was asked to develop the international division for BMG. Within a year, there were about 10 people in the department, and it was growing nicely. I started using sales figures, data points, and SoundScan to figure out which market was the strongest for each release. What's the budget we have, and how do we develop it? What's working, what's not working? Data started becoming a key area for me, and by around 2018-2019 we saw some really strong growth with releases. I realized the power and the essence of data.

When the pandemic happened, BMG slashed a lot of their budgets, especially in the developing frontline areas. I felt it was time for change. I got a call from Sung Cho, the founder of Chartmetric, in 2021, and I've been with the company for three years now. 

It is amazing to think how much the role of data has changed in music. You used to guess a band's relative position based on the rooms they played. “Oh, they play the Bowery ballroom when they come to New York, so they're at a certain level of popularity.” Now anyone can see the numbers. 

It's changed how we think about music. My approach is that data shouldn't be the answer to everything. If you like something, listen to it. If you want to sign an artist, listen to them. Bowery Ballroom is one of my favorite venues in New York. It might not be considered a huge thing, but considering how many shows happen in New York on a daily basis, being able to sell Bowery Ballroom is a huge statement. With data, you can look at that and say, how do I keep growing to the next level? How do you pinpoint the top markets? How do you target the right audience? It's helping you get better at what you do. 

‍I’d imagine for artists in particular, there's a huge range in terms of data literacy. 

Yes. But it's good for an artist to be aware of which platforms are working for them. “How do I know which of my songs are getting the best playlist support on Spotify? Do I have any radio support? Who’s my audience? What's the age group?” Giving you some context will hopefully help get your music to the right people. We have 10 million artists in our system, and I would say the vast majority are unsigned. They don't have a label. They don't have a manager. Hopefully they’ll get enough tools to be able to get a better idea about their career and how it's developing. 

Chartmetric recently published their 2023 Year in Music Report. What were some important takeaways? 

The PDF version of that report is 70 pages. It was so long we had to break the web version in two segments. It took us about six months to put it together. It’s the first time we did a year end report, even though we've been collecting data for so many years.

One example: We categorize artists in different segments. You have legendary artists on the top, then superstars, mainstream, mid level, developing, and undiscovered. There are millions of new artists coming out every year. Can these artists still break? In today's environment, can artists grow from one stage to the next? If you’re in the bottom tiers, undiscovered, less than 1 percent move up. But if you get some traction and you get to the middle, it's a lot easier to move to the next level. Becoming a superstar is very difficult. There are only something like 1,500 superstars out of 10 million artists. But you can grow. You can keep building your career because you have the tools; you have direct access to your audience with social media. It can be done, it's just not easy. 

Another amazing insight, to me, is where the new artists are coming from. The U.S. was number one, which was expected. But then you had Brazil at number two, India, Germany, Mexico, and then the U.K. It was fascinating to see how things are changing. Brazil is so diverse, and it [music] is a fusion of many different styles. I think Brazil is the next wave, as they develop the infrastructure and get the traction they need. 

AI and large-language models come up a lot in the music business. Since Chartmetric deals with such a mass of data, I imagine you are having conversations about how these tools could be incorporated to improve what you are doing.

Our founder comes from a technical background, as both a software engineer and in product management. That's what helped Chartmetric stand out at the beginning, how the platform was built. When AI was coming along, he was at the forefront,telling us that we should find ways to integrate it into our system. So we've been working on this diligently for a while, testing it internally. You can see some areas where AI has been implemented. We now use AI to take our [artist] bios and create quick bullet points [out of them]. Bios can be very long, and sometimes you just want to get to the essence of it.

We have expectations that eventually we are going to [use AI] to give you insights, action steps, and really help you understand the data. For us, AI is a very positive thing, and I think it's going to help our users decide on next steps.

‍Data is what computers were made for, right? What about just you personally? Is there anything about it that makes you uneasy when you're thinking about AI? Even outside of Chartmetric.  

Depending on what movie you watch, you get a different perspective. I grew up with those big Hollywood movies where AI can destroy the world. Then you read about it a lot, and there’s a concern that it's going to have an impact on musicians. Are they going to be credited for music created by AI? Can they take a song and use someone's voice and generate a new one? There are areas we're going to have to address. 

But I've been doing this for a while, and the only constant thing in music is change. I remember when Napster was starting. There were so many disruptions, and then physical media started going away, and chains started going bankrupt and shutting down. For a few years, the mindset was that music was going to be free and artists were just going to be making music from shows. Then we had the pandemic, and people couldn't go on tour, so they were relying on other areas to make money.

And here we are in 2024, and we're talking about AI.  We just have to adapt to it and find the best use of it, and utilize it for our own benefit and build on that. At the end of the day, I'm a bit of an optimist. I think technology is what helps music move forward as well helps musicians get better at what they do. I do think that there's going to be something good to come out of it.

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In late 2020, my wife Julie and I left Brooklyn and moved two hours upstate to Phoenicia, New York. We’d been in the city for nine years and with the pandemic raging, it felt like time to try something else. When I move to a new place, one of the first things I like to do is explore the music history of the area. I find it connects me to my surroundings, and broadens my perspective. When we lived in Fort Greene, I liked to read about the neighborhood’s history as a bohemian enclave, particularly for Black artists. Jazz musicians would often stay there when coming through town, with neighborhood residents like bassist Bill Lee (Spike’s father, who passed away last year and lived around the corner from our apartment) or trombonist Slide Hampton, whose house inspired the title of an Eric Dolphy tune. When we arrived upstate, learning about the music of the area meant diving into Barney Hoskyns’ book, Small Town Talk, which chronicles the history of the town of Woodstock, particularly in the ’60s and ’70s, when Bob Dylan’s presence drew a wide swath of musicians to the area. 

When I was in Brooklyn, much of my music listening was via headphones as I walked through the city. I’d call headphones + city streets one of the best settings for hearing music ever devised, offering you infinite ways to soundtrack your daily travels and also giving you new ways to think about what you’re hearing. But listening in the car, which I was doing regularly after moving, is an experience all its own, one that brings me back to trips when I first learned how to drive many (many) years ago. And motoring through the Catskills, through beautiful roads like Route 212—which winds through the hills between my house and Woodstock—offers an especially beautiful setting for hearing something new. 

I began exploring music that fit this setting. Some of it was drawn from the storied history of this area, including songs Dylan wrote while living in Woodstock and classics from artists like The Band and should-have-been-famous Bobby Charles who followed Dylan here. Others were from newer artists who recorded in Woodstock, immersing themselves in the area’s beauty to complete a record in one of the many studios that dot the hillsides. This playlist is mostly acoustic music, befitting the area’s history as a folk mecca, and a good deal of other artists with no direct connection to the Catskills—the rootsy rock of Lucinda Williams, Wednesday’s noisy alt-country, Sandy Denny’s witchy meditations from rural England—sounded great in the car next to these locally spawned sounds. 

Woven in with these rural jams are a handful of jazz tunes by artists who relocated to the Catskills, tying this playlist back to ones I made in my early days in Brooklyn. When driving to Woodstock on 212 I’d pass Grog Kill Road, which snaked up a hill, and think of the composer Carla Bley, who lived there until her death in 2023—most of her records since the early ‘80s were cut in her home studio. Drummer Jack DeJohnette is another jazz legend who has been based in the Woodstock area for years. Having this music in one place will always bring me back to these winding roads through the trees, thinking about a new phase in my life.

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At Third Bridge Creative, a significant portion of our work in the music space falls under the umbrella of curation, and the core of this service offering is our team of music experts. We have relationships with hundreds—if not thousands—of people who are extremely knowledgeable about music across genres, style, geography, and era, and they also have exceptionally good taste in their areas of expertise. These are writers, DJs, and musicians, mostly, and for TBC they bring their knowledge and taste to bear on a wide range of curation projects. In some cases, data plays a role in guiding part of the decision-making. But outside that, how do curators make decisions? What mindset do they have to adopt to select the right tracks for a project? 

We start from a creative brief, where the client has documented the guidelines for the assignment. As we begin our work, the curator's primary task is to balance three distinct imperatives. 

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Knowledge

‍First, they should draw on their own knowledge of what artists and songs belong in the scope of what the brief describes. This requires that they understand the parameters of the concept, and have a deep and broad understanding of the catalog of music that it encompasses. ‍

Audience

‍Second, the curator should take into account an imagined listener or viewer, and what they might wish to hear in the context of the assignment. ‍

Client priorities

‍The brief should go a long way toward conveying this third pillar. Priorities may include music the client is highlighting, artists they might be featuring, or content they'd rather not include in the assignment.

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Instincts and knowledge

While we undertake a wide variety of curation projects, from music supervision for software applications to metadata hygiene, for simplicity let’s focus on a playlist on a streaming DSP. The curator’s instincts and knowledge inform selections via their assessment of relevance, their understanding in terms of classification (genre, style, era), and their judgment regarding what’s most important. 

For instance, the curator may know that a given artist in a certain sphere is the most easily recognizable or widely known representative of a given sphere, but that there are plenty of opportunities to include others that either never got the same wide recognition, or their star faded more quickly for one reason or another. There are all sorts of reasons why songs get (and stay) big, and familiarity plays a part. Top 40 stations have long known that if you play a song 10 times a day, a significant percentage of the audience will come to expect it, and may even enjoy it. And if you extend this phenomenon across decades, some songs are big simply because of inertia; just because it's a frequently played and widely recognized song doesn’t mean that in its heyday, it was the only interesting thing going. 

Several years ago, Billboard assembled a list of the “Greatest of All Time Hot 100 Songs,” based on each song's performance on the Hot 100 charts starting in 1958. The No. 1 choice? The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights.” And No. 2 was Chubby Checker’s “The Twist.” Seeing those tracks adjacent to one another is confusing—in terms of artist, era, style, and content, they are very far apart. 

But it’s also instructive to think of them in terms of taste and, for lack of a better word, zeitgeist. Songs don’t get any more emblematic of an era than “The Twist,” but the number of people who currently wish to hear the song over and over again is probably relatively small. Similar judgments are made by curators in terms of which tracks fit where—are they truly of a given genre? Is their music essential to that genre?—and whether they matter in the context of their time. Another interesting example is rapper MF DOOM, who was important during his aughts prime but did not at the time sit at the center of the hip-hop conversation. He's become more influential following his death and his songs have gathered a great deal of momentum, but those tracks might sound out of place on a nostalgic playlist of his contemporaries, since he wasn’t operating in the same sphere during the era. Such distinctions are what separate hand-curated playlists from algorithm-driven ones. 

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Audience

The curator also needs to put themselves in the place of the imagined listener, using their own best judgment to think through what this person might want and expect from a given playlist. The ability of the curator to remember that they are not the (only) customer and to think broadly—to have their own tastes and priorities, but to square those with their understanding of the tastes and priorities of others—is crucial to music curation projects. 

In other words, the curator's own considerations of relevance, classification, and importance are still there, but they weigh them against their understanding of the average listener’s tastes, knowledge, and expectations. Is this audience filled with music people, obsessives who will understand the connections the curator might be reflexively making? Or are these music generalists who will above all appreciate a playlist that includes some songs they affectionately recognize? 

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Client priorities

While the interaction between the curator’s taste and knowledge and those of the audience is the most important nexus in curation, the choices need to be filtered through the client’s priorities, which, in some cases, sit outside the criteria outlined above. 

To take an example with obvious cultural resonance, if there is public controversy around a particular artist, their otherwise canonical music might be a poor choice for inclusion based on the client’s values. Or there might be something else happening on the platform that impacts potential track selections, such as a marketing initiative that's guiding some of the client's thinking. These needs—cultural sensitivity, internal promotions—form a third pillar of music curation for platforms.

The most skilled curators have an instinct for how to best balance these sometimes competing needs. Doing so requires an understanding of music, the audience, and the platform, which leads to putting the right song in the right place at the right time.

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One of the benefits of working at Third Bridge Creative is having the space to discuss music with coworkers. I’m surrounded by passionate people with deep knowledge, and every day I’m learning about artists and records that are unfamiliar to me, some of which have become favorites. Today we’re launching a playlist series at Third Bridge that’ll allow our staff to share music that they love in a format that is assembled to resemble a mixtape. Each Third Bridge Staff Mix will be built around a theme—spotlights on labels, aesthetics, eras, moods, and more—and we’ll try to make them all worth an hour or two of your listening time.

We’re kicking off the series with a mix I call Stereomagic. From the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, there was a strain of electronic music that featured a strong emphasis on melody, dub rhythms and textures, and a general sense of musical playfulness. A lot of this stuff was coming out of Germany—specifically Dusseldorf, Berlin, and Cologne—and was released on labels like A-Musik, Sonig, and ~scape. This mix puts two artists in particular at the center: Mouse on Mars, including tracks from several side projects, and Jan Jelinek, who also appears under a few aliases. In their music, and others included here, I hear an exciting combination of technological sophistication—digital workstations were improving rapidly during this era and brought all sorts of new possibilities—and human warmth, including sly musical humor. Beats and percussion are prominent early on in this set, but over the course of the mix the percussion drops away and the last few tracks operate in a space closer to drone, but with dub elements intact. I hope you enjoy it.