Data, the new Music Industry

One of the things that I've taken away from the Digital Music Forum: West conference I participated in the past couple of days is that there will be no shortage of data for artists and their representatives. In fact, I would say one growth area in the music industry will be that of data analyst and I suspect if you looked at the job boards for content owners you will find a listing. Not to undermine the importance of data but to say that it is some new phenomenom is just untrue, however now the focus is on data directly related to the interaction between the artist and their fan (as opposed to the traditional data utilized by labels like Soundscan, BDS, etc.). Obviously such data is a benefit to the independent sector or artists that have no label affiliation or team working on their behalf who otherwise didn't have this information available to them. But caution must be taken when trying to quantify the arts. To say you are able to analyze entire segments is to suggest that cultures remain stagnant. Things move, people change and with that so does the music.