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Universal and Havas announce mega-data alliance

By | Published on Tuesday 6 January 2015

Universal Music

Good news data fans. Thanks to a brand new alliance announced just there yesterday the “billion of data points that Universal Music and its artists generate through music, ticket and merchandising sales, streaming, social media and airplay” will now be “contextually analysed” by the “world-class algorithmic and data scientists” of advertising and communications group Havas.

Which is very exciting indeed. Contextual analysis is my very favourite kind of analysis, and so much better than all that non-contextual analysis you hear about these days. And as if to only confirm just how exciting all this is, Universal boss Lucian Grainge and Havas big cheese Yannick Bolloré rocked up at the CES convention in Las Vegas yesterday to tell us all about it. And there was a big bag of contextually analysed data for all those in attendance. With all that freshly cut data in the air everyone got a little bit giddy.

But not Grainge. No, he remained serious throughout, stressing just how much this new alliance would benefit all the popstars on his books. “We want to continue to find new revenue and marketing opportunities for all of our artists around the world” he said. “By leveraging our industry-leading big data tools and working with forward-thinking companies such as Havas to supercharge our efforts to realise previously untapped revenues from consumer brands and other new business partners”.

Bolloré, meanwhile, enthused: “Music transmits emotions, cultural symbols, and values like no other form of creative expression. By managing the most successful artists and largest music communities in the world, Universal Music is at the forefront of the industry and has already gathered unique consumer insights and databases to empower its labels, artists and fans. This first Global Music Data Alliance will allow our clients and other brands to further expand the common passion they share about music with fans and create more meaningful experiences for them”.

Perhaps most interestingly, the GMDA, as they’re calling it, will not only access all the data Universal’s labels are sitting on, but also stats from the mega-major’s Bravado merchandising business and its sister company, Vivendi Ticketing, which owns See Tickets. The sell to Universal’s artists is that the new data crunching will identify commercial opportunities for them, while potential brand partners will be able to use the insights to better identify the artist and genres they should be working with.

So maybe not quite the nonsense alliance you might have thought back there in the first paragraph. Though they did actually use the words “data points will be contextually analysed by world-class algorithmic and data scientists”, so your cynicism was justified I think.



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