Popular music search engine grooveshark has officially launched Beluga. Beluga is the spiffy new open music insights platform powered by in-house market research and stream data from Grooveshark. A quick and simple search for any artist will yield access to a wealth of entirely anonymized information on demographic, cultural and lifestyle, socioeconomic, product affinity, music habit, and general market research characteristics and trends pertaining to that artist’s fanbase. Suspicious, you say? Don’t fret — there’s no catch. Beluga is completely free and no registration is required.
How Beluga Works
Every time a song is streamed on Grooveshark, a log is created for that stream and various bits of data associated with its listener are stored to that log. The listener data, e.g., age provided at registration or questions answered in our survey platform, is then anonymized to protect our users’ privacy and security, and subsequently fed into Beluga where basic statistical techniques are used to find strong correlations throughout log entries.
Beluga collects data with complete transparency while still anonymizing user identities, creating pure listening-demand data, deep geographic and international music fan insight, pinpointed demographics, and first-party data unique to Beluga.
You may wonder how it can provide such detailed insights while ensuring anonymity. The answer lies in the enormous sample size of listeners — with 20 million individuals using Grooveshark on a monthly basis to enjoy music, Beluga can generate billions of stream logs without the threat of compromising our users’ privacy.
Why Beluga Empowers Artists and Benefits Fans
Beluga helps artists to better understand and connect with their worldwide fanbase and make informed decisions when planning tour routes, buying/selling merchandise, and building their following.
Beluga helps brands by highlighting statistically significant correlations between listening habits and brands, providing insight into what’s trending in digital music consumption, while identifying typical demographic and psychographic characteristics of an artist’s or brand’s target audience.
Beluga helps fans by making it easier for the artists that you love to understand and connect with you. Not to mention the fun of exploring statistics on your favorite artists, e.g., on average, fans of Quiet Company tend to have iPhones, own no pets, prefer Flickr above other social networks, and are students or work in the tech industry as developers/programmers. Where do you fit in and what fun stats can you dig up on your favorite bands?
Did we mention that it’s completely free and open to everyone? Leave us your comments…
