Thanks to Idol Stats, American Idol might be a lot less interesting this season. For the second year in a row, the site will try to predict the winners and losers of Idol’s current season by monitoring all the opinions of the contestants posted on blogs, message boards, and social networks across the Internet. Last year, Idol Stats correctly predicted the outcome of five consecutive rounds before missing on what turned out to be the closest final round in Idol history.
The site is powered by Biz360, a “social media monitoring service” that sells companies the ability to “find out what’s really important” and “receive early warning about threats to reputation and brands” by digging through over 15 million blogs, message boards and services like Facebook and Twitter for product mentions and then generating marketing stats.
The fact that Idol Stats missed its last mark wasn’t news last year. If Idol Stats works this time, it could turn the music business upside down.As the record business hurtles into the digital age, one of its key challenges will be redoing its budgets. The digital economy is all about niche markets, and most of the larger labels are having trouble figuring out how much money to invest in medium-sized artists. Industry wisdom states that it costs about $1 million to “break” an artist, but the concept of breaking an artist is somewhat outdated, a leftover vestige of the pre-digital age of mass culture. Spending $1 million on Drake probably still makes some sense, but how much should a label spend on an artist like LCD Soundsystem? What about Titus Andronicus? Or Das Racist? How big are their audiences? How big could their audience be?
Biz360 could probably answer questions like that fairly quickly, but the really interesting part comes from the company’s ability to help answer a much more important question: What else does this audience like?
It’s a very different kind of question, but it’s one they’re used to helping out with. Biz360 insights have helped gigantic corporations develop new products before (including cancer drugs [!]), and even though music taste is a much more subjective thing, a label’s ability to identify certain aesthetic or sonic characteristics enjoyed by a particular market (whose size and consumption habits they know) could be the difference between surviving and thriving (or, possibly, life and death).
It could also mean a whole new range of cookie cutters for record labels to pour their dough into.
According to Ryan Kuder, Biz360′s VP of Marketing, thinks the music business “is something that could be very interesting, not to mention fun, for Biz360,” and we’re on the fence about whether this is good or bad.
What about you?
Max Willens is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in XLR8R, Paper Magazine, Death + Taxes, Electronic Beats, HOOP, and The Village Voice. He lives in Brooklyn. Max currently serves as WAMM’s primary editor.
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