Learning about your market, part II

Okay, so I took the summer off from blogging. In the process, I finished and released a new edition of Record Label Marketing. Some of the changes include more emphasis on web marketing, digital music sales, and indie labels.
In the new edition of Record Label Marketing, I dig deeper into the realm of using the web to learn about your market. In the earlier post on the subject, I talked about the importance of analytics on your web site and how to use that information to improve your site and reach your goals.
There are other web services that can offer information on your fans and fans of similar artists.
Quantcast is a service that analyzes web visitors to sites (http://www.quantcast.com/). if you are an indie artist, they probably don't have much data on your web visitors. But you can use their site to find out about fans who visit sites of well known artists. Pick a few popular artists who appeal to the market that you are targeting with your music. Then study their quantcast data. You can get traffic, demographic and lifestyle information on those visitors. You can also get a list of other sites these fans visit. For example, when I type in http://www.davematthewsband.com/, I get information on what other sites these web visitors also frequent. And I find that Live Nation, CMT, Ticketmaster and Music Today are among the top mentions.

Another site to help musicians understand their web market is Band Metrics, who provide analytics specifically for the music industry. Their site boasts that they "assist artists in understanding their fans, while also helping them to manage their digital identity. It’s a great solution for independent artists, management companies, labels, venues, A&R reps, promoters, music supervisors, publicists, marketing agencies and others to understand fan activity, and fans’ sentiments towards artists." These analytics can incorporate aspects of the major social networks to show who's listening to, sharing and talking about their music across various social networking and blog sites.