Billboard cover
Carter appears on the cover of Billboard with Guy Oseary and Scooter Braun. He talks about the intersection of analytics and music:
The next phase of data is going to be transparency and also a deep dive into analytics—is it being used in a way that doesn’t violate the trust between the artist and the fans and the consumer and the brands? We wanted to see which songs [fans are] listening to from start to finish, which songs they’re skipping and which are the best playlists in which those songs could exist. That’s helping us realize what sorts of music are going to work at which format, and whether this song should follow the other on a particular release. It’s an ongoing education and we’re learning a lot.
He says Little Monsters is selling upwards of 6,000-7,000 presale tickets per show.
[In each city] we were doubling and even tripling what sponsor presales were and what other artists’ fan sites have done.
Wired UK cover
Carter is featured on the front cover of Wired UK. The accompanying interview talks about Backplane and Little Monsters, which is in beta and has 50,000 members, with a million invitations ready to be sent out to Lady Gaga fans who had registered online. Carter:
They’re highly motivated fans. This one isn’t for the passive. It’s for the die-hard die-hard. We could go to Facebook for pure numbers. But give us 500,000 really engaged people, and the blast radius will be enormous…Up until this point, we’ve been data dumb. If a kid goes and buys a CD at Best Buy, we have no idea who the person is, how many times they listen to it, or anything like that. But we’re building to the point where one day we’re going to have access to all of the data. There will be a time where we’ll be able to release music through the Backplane, where we’ll be able to release music videos through there, we’re going to be able to sell all our tickets through there. Over a period of time, we’ll be able to build that audience so they’ll know exactly where to come.
She still has a deal with Universal Records. but there will come a time when she’ll release music through her own site. It’s not just going to be about sells. It’s going to be about the streams coming through the site. For us, it’s important to be able to identify who’s listening to what. We want to own that data. We have to own that data…Treating a fan online is no different to treating a fan outside a hotel. They’re not expecting you to walk straight to your car. They want to take that picture, they want to feel that they know you. So when you come to somebody’s profile, and you like a piece of their content, or you compliment them on something that you saw, they remember it.