Immensity is an intelligent marketing analytics system that uses advanced statistics and machine learning to figure out which social activities or marketing campaigns are actually driving audience growth, fan engagement, consumption and revenue.
The following comes from Immensity for Artists, a company DMN is proud to be partnering with.
Over the past decade, Immensity’s Co-Founder & CEO, Nick Minicucci, has gained significant exposure into how musicians and teams operate as well as how machine learning is impacting various industries. He graduated music school and joined several local bands, one that signed with APA, and did some heavy touring for 6 years. In addition, he has been working around artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies since 2016, most notably working at MIT for 3 years where he was project manager on a multi-million dollar AI education research study.
“Machine learning and artificial intelligence has permeated the music industry in some really fascinating ways, but there are still massive issues surrounding data” says Nick. “This isn’t really a unique problem, data is growing rapidly and causing difficulties pretty much everywhere, but other industries have seen further advancements in AI/ML-driven technologies that are addressing some of their data problems. That, plus the many disparate and antiquated datasets the music industry has to deal with, definitely opens up an argument that the music industry might have it a little worse than some others right now.”
“Metadata, royalties, streaming data, social media and marketing data… there are pain points in every area,” Nick continues. “There are incredible tools out there starting to solve some of these issues, but there is a serious lack of intelligent tools addressing some of the others. Particularly, issues surrounding some of the biggest datasets in the industry right now – social media, digital marketing, and streaming data, and the mystery of attributing growth in one area to activity from another. Platforms don’t talk to each other well, data is siloed, so it’s difficult to understand what digital channels or campaigns are actually helping an artist stand out in an ocean of content and maximize growth/ROI”
For decades record labels were focused on quality over quantity – get one hit and everything else could fall into place. Quality is still a necessity and always will be, but now quantity is too. Optimizing that quantity is integral, and we’re seeing a pretty steep increase in quantity.
“Immensity solves several challenges that labels and artists face. The platform turns data into tactical take-aways, provided on an artist by artist basis. It allows for quick access to correlative, causal, and predictive analysis without any interpretation needed by research and insights professionals. It can scale easily to an entire roster, and it’s affordable – perfect for label/artist budgets.”
-Larry Mattera, Former Label Executive / Immensity Advisor
Just a few years ago, there were 8 million creators on Spotify, now there’s 11 million. There were 40,000 songs getting released per day, now there are 100,000.
Every artist has unique qualities and the digital strategies that work for one won’t work for another.
How can you possibly optimize and solve for this level of quantity and diversity?
This is the exact issue that Immensity is tackling. They bring a modern, data science and business intelligence-backed approach to this massive pile of data that every artist or team has to deal with and helps each one understand what is truly moving the needle.
The Immensity platform can pull publicly available data from ~20 different social media and streaming platforms in minutes, and makes it very simple for clients to integrate additional data that isn’t publicly available such as consumption, sales, or paid campaign data. From there, the system processes those datasets with both advanced statistics and machine learning. It looks for every possible correlative or causal relationship that might exist between certain platform metrics and important digital growth metrics – audience, fan engagement, consumption, and sales – and also measures how much predictive power platform datasets have over these digital growth areas. Everything then gets weighted, aggregated, and distilled down into Immensity’s simple, proprietary Impact Values/Insights – telling you exactly what channels and what activities or campaigns are actually making the biggest impact, and exactly what you should do with that information.
“Immensity helped our team identify that several social media content activities that appeared to be ordinary were driving significantly more traffic to DSPs than content we were originally focused on. It has changed our approach to future campaigns. I’m excited to share these learnings with fellow managers, promoters and merch companies to help increase conversions on their social commerce marketing.”
-Randy Nichols, CEO, Force Media Management / Immensity Advisor
An example insight from the Immensity system might look something like this –
“Instagram Likes had the biggest impact on your overall streaming dataset in the last 28 days. You should target 0.3% growth to total Instagram Likes to maximize this impact and continue increasing your streaming numbers most effectively in the short term. Look at your Instagram content or UGC containing your music that was getting Liked the most 11/6 – 11/9 and use that content as a base for duplication. Release similar content at least every 3 days for the next 28 days to give yourself the best chance at hitting these targets”
Or
“More streaming activity can be attributed to these 2 specific marketing campaigns on TikTok than almost every other campaign ran across Meta, Google, and Twitter, even though the amount spent on these campaigns was significantly lower. To maximize streaming consumption on your upcoming album release, you should reallocate ad budget to similar TikTok campaigns.”
The latter example is a paraphrase from an actual insight generated for a band, We Came As Romans. Immensity teamed up with WCAR and Hyperculture Marketing Group to analyze 12 months of paid campaign data and identify which campaigns had been driving the most consumption for WCAR so HMG could optimize ad spend and strategy for an upcoming album release. You can read more about this analysis in Immensity’s joint case study with WCAR and HMG here.
“Attributing growth in streaming consumption back to paid media has always been a bit of a black hole in data / marketing analytics…Immensity was able to not only bring clarity to the consumption data to confirm the hypothesis, but saved both Hyperculture, the label & management team immense amounts of time…The return on investment here was unbelievably clear”
-David Puckett, Founder & CEO, Hyperculture Marketing Group
“Our mission at Immensity is to both democratize modern and intelligent data science for artists and teams, and also help organizations power-up and scale their data science efforts,” says Nick Minicucci. “The Immensity system is set up really well to do both of these things and help the whole music industry optimize time and marketing budgets.”
Immensity Standard Marketing analytics, which provides analysis on publicly available data, comes with a 7 day free trial. Sign up right at immensityforartists.com, or reach out to learn more about Enterprise Marketing Analytics where you can upload non-publicly available data and take a more intelligent, data-driven path towards reaching your specific goals.