Surprisingly, album covers may bear more responsibility for the commercial success of an album over the actual songs themselves. Album covers have the power to make or break a release’s sales or even become the catalyst behind a song’s click-through on your digital service provider (DSP). As result, album covers are drawing an increasing amount of attention from optimization teams behind the release of an album for catalog artists. Digital innovation techniques have penetrated the process of the release of an album. For example, animated album cover art, motion cover graphics, and canvas visuals have been automated to graphically correlate with the sound and “vibe” of the currently playing song, appearing on a user’s main screen. The visual can come in various fashions – a traditional album cover that hosts an animation or a brief video of an artist’s music video. Either way, its inclusion has modernized and altered how listeners hear and see, music.
I personally learned of this digitally innovative success through conversing with David Gould, VP of A&R Optimization at Sony Entertainment. His team is solely tasked with the purpose of enhancing catalog artists’ sales and success through digital ingenuity. David shared that his team creates and attaches visuals to their artists’ songs on DSPs to prolong listenership, entice someone to click on the song, and promote the retention of listenership. Not only have these goals accumulated a variety of positive outcomes, but they are regarded as the driver of optimal playlist placement* on DSPs. *Optimal playlist placement is crucial for an artist and their representing label as it is correlated with algorithmic success. Ultimately, when a DSP recognizes a song performing well on a playlist, algorithms place it at the forefront of their services. This benefits not only the artist but the DSP in customer retention.
For Spotify, no revenue is earned if a song is clicked through within the first 30 seconds of its start. These visual covers slow the click-through process down as they captivate the attention and encourage the listener to view the album cover or canvas visual till its conclusion. According to Spotify, “Adding a high-quality Canvas to a track has increased streams by up to 120% and saves by up to 114%, in addition to lifts in artist profile visits and shares.”
It is important to note that not all canvas visuals or motion covers can enhance an album or song to that same degree. This makes using the right team and metrics imperative in unlocking the potential.
“Now what sort of potential?” you may ask. Well, there’s more.
In Spotify for example, Discovery Mode and Marquee are revolutionizing the financials of new releases all with the initial canvas visual in mind.
Discovery Mode is a feature that allows artists to expand their listener base and enables distributors to select music to personalize a session. In layman’s terms, it’s a data tracker for artists, their labels, and DSPs. When data collection is through, it allows strategists to allocate the optimal amount of resources to an album. And, traction follows suit with the more visually appealing visual covers for later releases and Marquee strategies, later explained. For example, Magic City Hippie rolled out a visual cover for each of their singles to entice deeper listenership and pick up on that Discovery Mode tracker.
Subsequently, a Marquee campaign can be conducted with these insights to build momentum for new releases by algorithmically targeting new listeners and driving them into confrontation with an artist’s previous albums. It is an in-app feature that notices if you are a new listener to a band’s latest release, it will notify and suggest to the listener to view and listen to other work created by that artist. Not only does Marquee track new listeners with the help of Discovery Mode. It tracks the type of listener – lapsed, casual, or recently interested. This results in, you guessed it – conversion, conversion, conversion. One-time listeners become lifelong fans and lifelong profit sources. You put a song on your playlist and money goes into an artist’s pocket… and their affiliated label. Because profit is based on a per-click basis, it is crucial for artists to get their songs on a playlist. Ultimately, using Marquee makes it 3x more likely an artist’s other works will be engaged on average.
In Magic City Hippie’s case, “30% of Marquee listeners saved a track from the album to their library or added it to a personal playlist. Plus, 20% of their Marquee listeners also streamed from their older releases like 2019’s Modern Animal.”
Within the age of AI comes privacy concerns and liability issues. However, these features are minimally intrusive as the DSP is tracking your listenership and is recommending music on your behalf, which most listeners enjoy. It makes it easier for listeners to find new music and curated playlists. It cuts out the time of discovery on behalf of the listener, however, still providing that exact feeling to the listener.
Hey Maddie! I really enjoyed reading your blog post today. I enjoy looking at cool and colorful album covers whenever I go on Spotify. It was interesting to learn about the profit differences in the music industry. I learned a little bit about it when I was in Intro to Music Business.
Nice post Maddy. The entire music streaming industry is wild, as it’s still so young comparatively to the “good ole days” of going to the record store and buying a physical album. It surely has hurt the artists trying to earn money per song, but I believe things are going to fluctuate in the future for the betterment of artists. My sister used to work for a startup company called Get Engaged media where she was the one creating both the album covers and live videos for artists. She worked with artists like Megan thee Stallion, Lil Baby, and Young Thug. These artists/label companies would hire Get Engaged who has a large portfolio of expertise increasing listener conversion and retention. This is a super cool service, and my sister really enjoyed working for this company, but keep in mind they were a startup in an extremely competitive and emerging space. Lower salary, always on call, no benefits, etc. Pros and cons!
Great post. Don’t forget to use images in the future. It’s been really interesting to follow the music industry over the past few years, with its predicted demise through file sharing to new life through Spotify and streaming services.
Hi Maddy! This is a great topic to research because if you listen to music on a DSP, which is most of us, this is certainly relevant. Customer retention is crucial for artists in the music industry, and the two examples you outlined demonstrate the importance of data collection and analysis. Who would have thought that album covers were so important? While I appreciate good artwork, I did not expect visuals to be so impactful in retaining listeners. I’d love to hear more about your conversation with David Gould, and improving artists’ sales through “digital ingenuity” sounds fascinating. After reading your blog post, I can confirm that I have been successfully targeted by many artists and labels. The algorithm works surprisingly well, and many artists’ lifelong fans undoubtedly became fans because of a DSP recommendation.
This is something that I never truly considered. I had no idea how important visuals and album covers were for artists and having their music played. I like a better-looking album cover, but I didn’t know it increases sales by that amount! I knew there were a lot of analytics and data that went into apps like Spotify, so I appreciate you laying a lot of it out with your experiences!
It is so true that the album cover is correlated with the “vibe” of the album. I used to have pictures of all my favorite songs and their album covers on my wall and it was so hard to pick some because even if I loved the song, the cover had to be aesthetically pleasing enough for me to hang it up. I also love when I am listening to a song and there is a short clip of the music video or a cool moving graphic in the background. Those definitely make me stay and listen to the song longer than if there was no picture at all.
Hey Maddie! I enjoyed reading your post on new advancements in the streaming industry. Cover art has been something that has always intrigued me. If I like the cover art I will usually give the song more of a chance than a song with a bland cover. I wonder with new AI technology if song artists will start to turn towards using AI to make cover art/ videos. My concern with this however is that the art will not be as original as if someone designed the cover art themselves.
Hi Maddy, this was a great read. I never knew about this new innovation in the music industry. It is crazy how technology plays a big part in what we choose to listen to and what grabs our attention. Album/song covers have always played a part in me picking what albums I should listen to and what songs I should play, but I did not know it was important to that extent. It was wild to learn that the creative album art using this method has increased streams for certain music by up to 120%. I’m really interested in seeing how this innovation develops further into the future!
Hello Maddie! I really enjoyed reading your blog post and found it very interesting. I didn’t know that having a high quality album cover improves sales and always thought the cover didn’t have such a huge impact on sales. I am interested to see how AI evolves in the music industry in the future.
Hi Maddy! This blog post taught me a lot more about the technology that is used to track streams in the music industry! I never knew that listening to 30 seconds of the song was what it took to qualify to get revenue from the song. It makes sense that having a really unique and noticeable album cover would help out with getting more sales for the artist, especially since that could be a topic of conversation for people even before the album is released. This was a great post!