Aug 06 2019 3 mins
- Highlights
- What happens when a global artist gets sued by another for copyright infringement? Not much for the former, but a notable increase for the latter...we’re talking about music data by the way, not legal damage payments.
- Mission
- Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.
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- Date
- This is your Data Dump for Wednesday, August 7th, 2019.
- Katy Perry, Flame and the Effects of Publicity
- We’ve all seen industry gossip and trade news before...but have you ever used it to measure the impact of publicity?
- For the past week, both general and industry news sources have been reporting on the lawsuit of American rap artist Flame and the alleged copyright infringement of Katy Perry and team on her widespread 2013 hit, “Dark Horse”.
- Though debate still rages in the industry on whether it was valid in the eyes of copyright law, the jury itself decided it was indeed infringement, and ordered the American pop star and songwriting team to pay $2.78M in collective damages to the defendant.
- From a data perspective, what’s interesting is how this kind of news affects their digital profiles.
- For example, looking at the past week of social and streaming data for Katy Perry since news of the lawsuit first broke around July 30th, there was….basically no effect.
- No extra playlists or apparent correlation to Instagram follower count or Spotify monthly listeners….just more Katy Perry-level numbers, which is more than 7K new daily Spotify followers, 13M more daily YouTube views and 21K new daily IG followers….all in a day’s work.
- But for a lesser known artist like the Christian rapper Flame, he did experience a notable increase in digital profile.
- As of late, Flame in comparison had only gained about 67 new daily Spotify followers and 184 new YouTube daily views….and actually did score a few new charts.
- For example, “Joyful Noise”, which was the 2009 Flame track that was allegedly knowingly copied from by the Perry team, charted on official Viral 50 Spotify daily charts for the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada.
- It was for one day on August 2nd, a few days after the news had been able to make the news rounds in places like the Guardian, Rolling Stone, the BBC and Associated Press, and the track itself sat in the 13th, 15th and 24th respective positions on the 50-track viral charts.
- Its YouTube video went from 1800 daily views on Monday July 30th to more than 580 times that, peaking on July 31st at over 1M daily views….even the track’s Genius page, which only had less than 10 daily views the week prior, jumped to 740 the week of the proceedings.
- More than the track itself, Flame’s general artist profile gained 331 Spotify followers on July 31st, almost 5x his recent daily average, and his Spotify monthly listener count as of Monday August 5th has more than doubled in size to over 500K from his count only a week prior.
- He experienced similar multiples of increase in Twitter followers, retweets and Wikipedia views.
- So what does this mean for the rest of us? Possibly, a way to measure the effects of publicity….it’s virtually impossible to do so on a global superstar, but with an artist with a relatively little daily digital footprint, we can see which platforms are most affected by such news on certain given sources...and maybe be able to plan for future publicity expectations when working with your own artists.
- Because as they say in the show biz, “Any publicity is good publicity.”
Outro
- That’s it for your Daily Data Dump for Wednesday, August 7th, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.
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- Article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.com
- Happy Wednesday, see you on Friday!