Michael: Yeah. Alright. Excited to be here today with my new friend, Aël Guégan. Let's go. I think I pronounced it somewhat right? I probably, but a little bit, but I got close. Yes, you did.

Aël: Thank you. Yes.

Michael: Awesome, Aël. So Aël is the Partnerships Executive at Soundcharts. So if you're in the music industry, then you're probably familiar with Soundcharts. If you're not, then I would definitely recommend checking them out. They have an amazing reporting system that basically helps you keep a finger on the pulse of your metrics and your insights. And so, he advises artists and music record labels how to use their data to plan their releases, pitch the industry pros, grow their fan base. And this really, for me, one thing that is dawning on me right now because I've experienced the effects of not having clear KPIs and metrics, is how important analytics are just in general, like having a finger on the pulse. The metaphor that comes to mind is it's sort of like driving down the highway. And if you don't know what your metrics are, if you don't have insights, it's sort of like having a blindfold on and you're like, hold onto this car. It might be going fast, but maybe if you know how to drive, you can keep it going for a little bit, but at a certain point it's gonna start to veer off track and you're gonna lose that insight. So Soundcharts basically lets you take the blindfold off to see what's happening. So, Aël, really looking forward to connecting today, and I appreciate you taking the time to be on the podcast.

Aël: Thank you, thank you for inviting me. Very excited about this discussion today, and yeah, looking forward to it.

Michael: Awesome. So, Aël, maybe to kick things off, could you share a quick introduction to yourself, how you got started at Soundcharts, and maybe the heart of what you think is the core problem that you focus on with Soundcharts?

Aël: Yeah. So maybe a quick intro about me. So, I've been working for the past seven years in the industry. I started working at a radio station, and already back then, it was not so long ago, but back then you had little to no analytics for the programmers at the time to know if a song was played on the radio, even on their own radio station. So you had no way of extracting a CSV of plays on your own. It wasn't a small station. It was like a medium-sized station that you could hear, that is broadcasting nationally in France. And so, this was a short time after that I joined Soundcharts, where I started to build the partnership department, meaning as soon as there is someone who might be interested in analytics or who might want to integrate our solution for a specific key need, well, at that point, it goes through me because there is an automation somewhere or because they end up having a meeting with me. So, Soundcharts, to tell you a bit more about what we do: you can see it as a huge data aggregator that you can access through a login, like you would have a Netflix account or like you would go to IMDB to check stats about movie stars and ratings for movies. Well, it's exactly the same but for the music industry. So we have that huge radar that we started building 10 years ago when the world was a bit simpler, and as soon as anything happens for any artist out there, we have ways of knowing that it happens, meaning we track the traditional media radio stations, we track streaming platforms, and we monitor, of course, social media services. So we aggregate all of that and make it all available in one place. So one of the main things that we see at Soundcharts is indeed having musicians and professionals as well who are not really equipped, who don't know actually how to do their reporting and how to use it and how to use all of the tools that are out there to actually make decisions and to set measurable goals and objectives. It's like the metaphor that you used about driving but don't know exactly where you are driving. You are sure that you're going 90 miles per hour, but you don't know where exactly. And so, every day you can wake up and post a bunch of things and release some stuff, but you don't really know what's the reality in your niche. You don't know how exactly your profile is performing. You don't know maybe that you had a radio play in a key station. It might be interesting for you. So, long story short, we try to solve that by aggregating everything and having one source of truth. So as an artist, you don't need to go back every day to a dashboard and look at maybe empty graphs or having 10 tabs open with all of your Spotify for Artists and the others open, but you have one source of truth where you can log in once in a while, and then also set up alerts and notifications so that as soon as something happens, you are the first to know, but you're not doom scrolling an empty dashboard again. So that's basically what we're trying to do. And building this unified database allows also other tools to be plugged to our dataset and display part of what we're tracking and collecting, to show that marketing campaigns had indeed an impact, to do some reporting about radio plays. So we are a data aggregator. We have a platform, but there are also a bunch of use cases that you can have using Soundcharts and our data in a nutshell.

Michael: Cool. Man, that is so awesome. So what I'm hearing you say is that really the core purpose is, because there's so many different platforms and social media profiles that someone might have, trying to keep track of all the analytics in all the different places is basically next to impossible. So what we've created is a solution that brings it all into one dashboard, one place, so you can keep a finger on the pulse of what's happening. I'm super excited to dive into more of the platform integration level in terms of what does this look like to integrate this with our software as a service, and I'm curious to dive deeper into the product. What are all of the platform limitations in terms of integrating from an API standpoint like Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and YouTube, and I'm curious what platforms you're able to pull in from and what the lay of the land is in terms of what metrics do you have access to, what metrics does no one have access to. What does that look like?

Aël: So yeah, it's an interesting question because the first thing to understand is that we only track and monitor what's public. So anything that's private, we are not able to collect, track, monitor. It's impossible for us. So a radio play by essence is public because you can sort of Shazam and say, oh, that's actually this song. That's basically what we do on scale. We just, for the radio, Shazam thousands of streams of online streams, and we know whatever is being played on air. For the streaming and social part, we are mainly plugged to public APIs, and so we're able to get everything that's public and to consolidate the data, meaning you never have two platforms that actually agree with each other when it comes to even performing artist profiles. I'm not even talking about composers or pure producers, et cetera. Just at Spotify profiles, you might have platforms that aggregate all of the music of all artists that are called Atlas in one profile. So you could be me or a folk music or be a jazz band called Atlas. That is, in our humble opinion, not a very good idea because you'll end up in the very generic profile of all DSPs. And so you'll have one DSP telling us, well, that's actually this profile, and another DSP telling us, well, it's actually this other profile. And so our expertise is to define what's actually the truth behind what platforms send us. So, regarding social media, we track, of course, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok metrics: engagement, number of followers, how the music is being used in short videos, but also where are the fans from and what are the notable followers—so the biggest accounts following a specific account. And streaming-wise, it could be about chart entries, about playlist entries, about monthly listeners, popularity scores, in actually any platform. So it could be the main Western platforms like Spotify, or it could be more local platforms like Gaana, JioSaavn in India, like Melon in Korea, like Audiomack, Boomplay. All of these we also track and aggregate. Again, two platforms won't exactly share the same metrics and won't have the same way of displaying, for instance, streams, which is a very key metric when it comes to the music industry. Some platforms don't share it publicly, some platforms do. So yeah, our role is just to aggregate everything, even more importantly to aggregate also the metadata layer, so that we're sure to look at one artist's profile which is from the correct nationality, the correct language, music genre, etc. And so we have a collaborative platform, meaning that users can come to the platform. You have a freemium tier, you can just log in, input all of your information, and submit so that we will have your profile as clean as possible, which might be quite important as more than often platforms or actually people trying to discover new talents and songs might end up using tools like Soundcharts to do their discovery. So having a very clean profile on those tools will increase your chance at being discovered by someone who's just going through a listing of songs and saying, well, let's look at the songs that are from Germany and that are sung in German. So, if your metadata and data is correct, you have a higher chance at being discovered. So yeah, to give you a global idea of what we track and how we do it.

Michael: Super interesting. So, when it comes to tracking cross-platform analytics, what I'm hearing you say is that there's some smart logic that looks up the artists on the different platforms, but because they're all different platforms, they all have different data structures. Sometimes matching the artists, the right artists on all the platforms is a good thing to sign up and review and make sure that it's clean, that it actually is matched correctly. And I'm curious from a platform integration standpoint as well, like with our software as a service, if we were to integrate something like Soundcharts, what would that look like from an integration standpoint? How do you normally map to external integrations and platforms in terms of how do they share identifiers in order to make sure that they're reaching the right people?

Aël: So indeed it's a good question. It's different from the dashboard. So the API—our API—powers our dashboard, but also powers a bunch of other dashboards. And chances are, even if you've never seen Soundcharts, you've seen our dataset before because you've seen it on other tech tools that you may use. You have tools that do music discovery using AI, for instance. Well, you might need at one point a dataset and a layer of intelligence to know what artist profiles are, to know the metadata about these, etc. So on our end, our API is very straightforward to use. Each artist, each song has a unique identifier, and we also aggregate all of the identifiers from all platforms. So, if you were to use Soundcharts’ API tomorrow, either you have a listing of names, or you have a listing of URLs and therefore platform identifiers, or you could even have industry identifiers, meaning ISRCs. And using this, you can get a song by ISRC or get an artist using a platform ID, and it's very straightforward. You get all of the metadata associated with that artist. You get, again, the country, the genre, the biography, asset, the image, and all metrics that we were able to collect, from the followers to the monthly listeners and the TikTok usage. So yeah, and then it's just a question of being a bit tech savvy to integrate it all and to know how to work your way around APIs. But yeah, our API is very fast and easy to use. It's a fun way to get to know what we track to just go to our developer API and click “try it out.” We have a sandbox environment, and once you generate the token, then you can start hitting the API with real-life examples.

Michael: Super cool. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, we might end up being a customer for you in terms of using the API and creating a dashboard for it, so looking forward to diving more into that. And my next question would be around, you know, it's one thing to have the dashboard and have understanding of the metrics and to have all of the numbers that they need, and it's another thing to use those metrics and pay attention to them and set targets against them and stay on track towards goals that are meaningful to them. So I'd love to hear from your perspective, having worked with a lot of artists who are using the platform and using it to grow their career and their fan base, what have you seen that kind of separates folks who are having the best results and are really making the most traction and using the tool to help them accomplish their goals versus artists that might give up early or are struggling to use it?

Aël: Yeah. So there are a lot of different ways of using Soundcharts. There are no specific steps from which it starts to become interesting. You can already use it from a very early stage, but you won't have at all the same usage. So when you are a very small artist, when you just start your career, again, it's useless to look at empty graphs where you see no streams or sales, and you don't have any radio plays, you don't have any editorial playlist entries. So the way to use the tool would be rather to understand who your first audience is. We have demographics around who is the typical follower for Instagram or YouTube or TikTok following you, and trying to understand who's the persona—how old, male/female, where that person lives. Do I have any notable followers—big accounts following my account? And so you are more focused on the social media part of things. Also, what you can do is, as I mentioned, you can set up a report so that every day or every Wednesday, for instance, you receive in your mailbox a short summary of what has happened in the past seven days for your profile, so you are sure to not miss anything without spending too much time on it. Then, when you start to grow a bit, start to have some playlist entries, maybe a couple of radio plays, you start to see more data points that are active and more notifications maybe. And for that size, it is interesting to compare your profile with other artists in the same niche. Again, knowing that you have a radio play in itself, you are like, okay, I have that radio play, but then what do I do? Well, the first thing maybe to do if you have a radio play from a small radio station is to reach out to PR and say, well, there is some kind of traction that is happening right now. Let's maybe convert that, and if something happened once or twice, it's the beginning of a story to tell. Another thing that you can do, even if it's a very small radio play, you can write something on X and say, well, hey, thank you to [name of the radio station], and very happy to have been played in this show. That's wonderful. And we always advise artists to do that because that small radio station, it might be the same person looking at X and being the actual DJ who put your song on air. So, first you need to know what's happening to then define measurable goals and to start wondering what's the next step, and it could be very small steps at the beginning. But this example with a radio station illustrates that anything can be a signal, and you can use any signal to build your story within the industry. And it's just like planning a tour. You don't do Madison Square Garden on day one. First you'd like to understand who is your audience, where is your niche. What you can do on Soundcharts is discovery, so you can very easily say, well, who are the artists that are in my music genre and who actually emerged one year ago or six months ago, and what exactly did they do on social media? What did they do on streaming platforms? What was their strategy? And you can really highlight four to five profiles very easily by listing artists. All of that you can do with a free account on Soundcharts. You don't have to pay a full subscription to do that. And so, this allows you from the first moment where you experience growth to have a place where you compare yourself to other profiles, and without it being too toxic, and just setting up notifications and logging in once in a while and making sure that everything's aggregated so that when something happens, people discover you and also you know it so that you can act on it.

Michael: Cool. Yeah, good stuff. So, I mean, it sounds like what you're saying is if we compare this to the driving analogy, before you start driving anywhere you kind of want to figure out where you're trying to get to. What are your goals? So at the beginning, using the platform to figure out your target audiences and understand your demographics, understand where you're going, is sort of like step number one—planning your trip. And then if you're going on a trip, you probably want to see other people who've gone on the trip before and see what route did they take. And so it's kind of seeing how did they get there, like they're at that destination already. So it's like how did they go from here to there and learning from that. Then how you're using the tool changes quite a bit based on what stage you're at. If you're already on the road, if you're driving, then you want to make sure you don't have that blindfold on. You are checking this regularly, and it gives you synced updates weekly, which is great. And yeah, this driving analogy really has some— I was gonna say some legs. There's more wheels. It's got wheels. Cool. So I'm curious where, having this kind of perspective from being able to understand trends that are happening in the music industry and having access to the data and also seeing what's working across different artists and what some of those different waves are, I'm curious if you have any perspective in terms of where do you think things are headed moving forward in one to five years as it relates to the wider music industry, in particular for indie artists who are the folks who are watching or listening right now. What are some of the trends that you're noticing in the larger dataset that someone listening to this or watching this right now might want to consider swimming along with the current of the wave that's coming?

Aël: So in terms of data aggregation, you don't have huge hidden datasets of public data that await for us to collect. Almost everything that's public in terms of main metrics, we already started to collect this. So, today using Soundcharts or that type of tool, you already get the global picture. In terms of data aggregation, we've reached sort of a ceiling. Of course, there are a lot of things that we're adding daily to the platform regarding the live industry, regarding some moods, lyrics analysis. So there are a lot of other layers of intelligence that do exist. But as artists today, if you log into Soundcharts, you have everything that someone can collect about a specific profile. Then it's more about, again, like you said, what to do with it. Looking at graphs, you can already start to build a strategy. But something that we're seeing a lot now—I don't know if it's a good thing, I don't know how it will work in the long term, I haven't tried any of these solutions yet—but you see a lot of AI managers that are actually apps to which you pay a subscription. They are also plugged to APIs to have a layer of intelligence on which they build to know if an artist logs in, which niche is this artist in, which radio stations play that kind of music, which playlists are interesting, getting creators’ profiles, etc., so that they would recommend actions for any size of artist and any music genre. It'll be very interesting to have that discussion in five years because a lot of these companies may start building interesting products or they might just not work at all and not be a good fit for our industry. But currently that's where we see a lot of new business happening. So I'll be very curious to see that because what they can do is, from the dataset that exists and from what the artist tells them about their strategy and the links that they provide, they can build a strategy and they can also go to the next step, the next step being generating assets and automating posts on social media, planning a four-week marketing plan before a concert, for instance. So, I don't know if it's good or bad, but for a lot of artists who may not want to invest all their time on Instagram and writing posts they're not comfortable with, it might partly help them. But yeah, that would be a very interesting thing to listen to my answer to this question in five years and laugh because I would have completely missed the point and the industry would have gone in a completely different direction. But yeah.

Michael: Cool. I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense. So what I'm hearing you say is that one interesting development that you're starting to notice is, like the rest of the world and every industry, AI is starting to enter the equation and having an intelligent agent that can take actions on behalf of our situation to give us guidance and advice is an interesting trend. And so starting to use these tools to help support your career and to basically give you plans and action steps toward those goals. Coming back to our driving analogy, it's like installing a GPS into the car so that, based on the metrics, based on what the car is seeing on its dashboards, it's able to create that navigation to get you where you want to get to. That's cool. I don't think you're gonna look crazy in five years. To me that feels like a definite—like that's where things are headed towards—more and more of a copilot/intelligence agent that's a personal guide or assistant. And it'll be interesting to see how much that comes from one generalized model versus a very hyper-focused, specific model, or maybe both—the specific model built on the wider one, then there's all the different sublets. But yeah, what a time to be alive, and we get to witness this birth of this level of intelligence.

Aël: I do agree, and it's definitely more interesting than the Web3 thing that happened five years ago. So yeah, I believe AI is more promising in its daily implications for both tech companies, artists, and also, of course, the professionals in the industry.

Michael: Yeah, 100 percent. I totally agree. It could even, in a roundabout kind of way, lead to more of a need for Web3 in terms of verification or authenticity, because now the AI is getting so good at generating fake stuff that it's sort of like, what's real, what's not real. So I see a potential—I'm not a huge Web3—I understand all of it and blockchain, but from what I understand it has some valuable use cases potentially in that need of being able to verify authenticity of content. So yeah, maybe it'll find its way around. An analogy with driving that we can bring Web3 to... It is a hard one. It's like you have a burglar who hops into your car and— but no, he says he's a cop, but you're like, is this actually a cop? And then he shows you his badge, and the badge shows he's a cop. We're stretching. This doesn't fit quite as nicely as the rest of them. Cool. Okay. So, curious what you think are some of the biggest mistakes that artists and/or partners that want to integrate the platform—what are some of the common pitfalls or mistakes that you'd recommend they avoid as they get started using the platform?

Aël: So yeah, you have two things actually, as always. You have the dashboard itself, and you have using the data itself to build other tools, which are two different things that come with different layers of expertise. But when using the platform, the most frequent thing that we see is people making decisions based on only one vertical. At Soundcharts, we aggregate and try to make sense of everything by having the radio, the playlists, the charts, the audience all in one place, so that if you have a peak on Shazam somewhere, maybe it's a radio play. So making decisions based on only, I don't know, touring decisions based on only an artist’s monthly listeners, is of course a bad idea. This specific example, we rarely see anyone doing it like that, but it's always about looking at the bigger picture and comparing several verticals. Another common mistake that we see is people focusing on metrics that do not really matter for their size—again, streams when you are a very small artist—and not focusing enough on the audience part of things. And another thing that we see is also people being very hyped about a lot of tools and actually spending too much money on a bunch of tools and having the impression of being very well-equipped, but actually they are not, because of course it is not because you pay for a subscription that you end up growing or that it really makes a difference. So it's really about picking the right tool, picking a lot of free models and freemium tiers and alternatives, and only investing when you start to see that it makes sense and makes a difference. Of course, the last mistake that we see is people looking at this and not transforming it into actionable, measurable goals, and comparing profiles. This sounds obvious, but we actually rarely see it. The first usage is looking at our own profile and being stuck like a deer in the headlights.

Michael: You got the car analogy back.

Aël: Yeah, nice. And actually, regarding people trying to integrate our data in their system, we rarely see a lot of mistakes, because most of the time they have a specific goal in mind. Let's say I have a marketing tool, and I want to integrate Soundcharts data for a reason. It's not just to rebuild Soundcharts in your own tool, because that doesn't make sense, because you want to prove your point. Here your point is, you were right paying for my marketing solution, and look at your stats, they start to go up right after you start paying me. So that's the bias that they have, and most of the time it's very straightforward, and in a couple of weeks, sometimes days, everything is well integrated, because we offer some smooth integration and communication with the rest of the team to make sure that you understand what the metrics are, that your users understand these as well. On our end, we already built a tool that was displaying these metrics, but we're always happy when we see our data being used in someone else's dashboard, because we believe that those metrics should be directly in the tools that people use on a day-to-day basis. So it shouldn't be locked in Soundcharts or other places. It should be spread where you need it to be. So we really believe in a collaborative industry on this.

Michael: Awesome.

Aël: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Michael: So, to repurpose it into our metaphor, what I'm hearing you say is that one of the biggest mistakes is when you're getting started on that trip and maybe you've defined where you're trying to get to and you're about to set out on that path, one of the temptations is to get a really super fancy car that's super expensive, maybe outside of your budget. And to be fair, it looks cool or whatever, but do you really need it to go from point A to point B? Maybe take a look at your actual budget and what's actually going to be helpful. And if your goal is just to go from point A to point B, then you don't necessarily need the Ferrari in order to get there, but you just need to figure out what you actually do need. And there are great tools and freemium models and things to explore to do that. Cool. I think that was the most obvious metaphor that came up with the car one, but lots of great insights there overall. Cool. Yeah. And then using the tool—not just using it like a deer in the headlights and just using it for your own data—but using it and actually comparing the demographics and the market and what other people are doing, and some of those techniques that you suggested earlier around not only looking at where people are at now, but also looking at the path that they took to get there and looking back at what were they doing at the time that they were at your starting point right now, so you can kind of reverse engineer that path. Sweet. Aël, this has been a lot of fun. Yeah. I've been known to be a metaphor kind of guy, but I feel like we took it to the next level during this ride. We took it up a gear, we shifted gears, and we're going on the highway fast. So it's fun having you on the podcast. I appreciate what you're doing with Soundcharts, and looking forward to diving deeper into the tool for ourselves as well and integrating it from a platform partnership standpoint. For any artists who are watching or listening right now, and they think this sounds great and they want to learn more or dive deeper, where would you recommend they go to connect more?

Aël: Well, they can of course go to soundcharts.com and create a free account. And so, again, you can leverage a lot of things out there without having to enter any credit card details. And if you want to personally reach out, you can always do so on LinkedIn. Sorry, my name is a bit hard to pronounce. You maybe see the spelling in the name of the episode, but it's Aël Guégan.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah, and we'll put all the links in the show notes for easy access. And, Aël, it's great having you on the podcast. Thanks for being here.

Aël: Many thanks. It was wonderful.