Welcome to Stems, a weekly newsletter about music, media, and tech. In this issue we play junior marketing exec and look at the shopping habits of different artists' fans; we also try to recover from the new Puffy doc and dig into AI's quiet Nashville takeover. As always, write us with tips and comment at [email protected]
What Your Music Taste Says About Your Shopping Habits
Nothing puts the “business” in music business like looking at demographic data on an artist’s fans. Sometimes, things are better left unexplained: A very popular country artist’s management team once demonstrated to a friend at a meeting that their key audience demographic was middle-aged women who don’t like music.
Some data is too fun to ignore, though. That’s the case with the brand affinity data on Chartmetric, which features info on which artists’ fans are more likely to favor certain corporate brands. Using data pulled from an artist’s Instagram followers, it tracks how much an artist’s followers show interest in certain companies and assigns a ‘brand affinity’ score to each brand. The percentages below show how much more an artist’s fans like a given product compared to the general population.
Let’s jump into some highlights!
PETSMART
Walker Hayes ↑38%
Jason Aldean ↑27%
Darius Rucker ↑25%
Miranda Lambert ↑25%
If you needed proof that country music fans really like their dogs, here it is. One mild surprise: Eric Church, known for having a Covid-sniffing dog on tour in 2021, didn’t make this list.
Jason Aldean
TACO BELL
"Weird Al" Yankovic ↑38%
Renée Rapp ↑35%
You may not realize it, but both Weird Al and Renee Rapp have mild connections to Taco Bell, which appear to have translated into a long-term fondness amongst their fans for the home of the Meximelt. Rapp participated in a Mean Girls x Taco Bell collab some years ago, and Weird Al recorded a parody of Gerardo’s “Rico Suave” in 1992: the deathless “Taco Grande.”
LEVI’S
Frank Ocean ↑67%
Lainey Wilson ↑67%
This one gives you a sense of how haphazard this brand science can be. Frank Ocean has never done a Levi’s ad, but he has had a couple lyrics on jeans – a deep cut from 2008, “Denim,” and some passing references (“stone washed jeans” in “Big Enough”); or is there just some psychographic overlap going on? Side note: Pity poor Wrangler, who hired Lainey Wilson to do a special “Bell Bottom Country” line a couple years back. And yet her fans still like Levi’s a lot.
Bridgers
AIRBNB
Phoebe Bridgers ↑169%
Bridgers has no affiliation with Airbnb, but her fans frigging love it – their affinity score is the highest of any artist here. Is it her song “Kyoto,” about one of the finer potential Airbnb destinations in the world? Is it her roaming heart and her appeal among young millenials, a core Airbnb demo? Do Phoebe Bridgers fans feel a kinship with companies that storm into markets and remove housing units? The answer is muddy.
NUTELLA
Nicole Scherzinger ↑110%
Macklemore ↑93%
P!nk ↑90%
Backstreet Boys ↑73%
Adam Levine ↑67%
Lenny Kravitz ↑63%
None of these pop stars have any documented connections to Nutella that I could find. Also, Lenny Kravitz has followed a strict raw vegan diet since 2016, growing his own food in the Bahamas, so it’s possible this data nugget might cause him some alarm.
Pink
But Nutella targets Millennial parents, especially women, which lines up pretty well with fans of these artists, who were all big in the 2000s and 2010s. Nice job, you Nutella marketing nuts!
IKEA
Bruce Springsteen ↑12%
Bruce fans like IKEA just 12% more than the greater population. And yet that blip is enough to put them in the top tier of music lovers who favor the the Swedish furniture behemoth. Is it the strong sense of rootedness and place in Bruce’s lyrics? Could it have something to do with IKEA’s large New Jersey footprint, which includes outlets in Elizabeth, Paramus, and Cherry Hill? No comment from Pavement, whose “Date From IKEA” didn’t appear to endear their fans to the chain.
“Sean Combs: The Reckoning” is Devastating; plus: Nashville Songwriters Go AI
I didn’t think there was much more to be said on Diddy (there has been no shortage of reporting, plus two recent docs), but Netflix’s Sean Combs: The Reckoning is riveting. Executive produced by 50 Cent and directed by Alexandria Stanley, it builds a brutally convincing profile of Combs as a cruel megalomaniac and pathological liar who has gotten away with terrible behavior again and again and again.
50 Cent has been a very public Diddy antagonist and social media troll for years, so some have reasonably questioned his involvement in the doc. I suspect it helped get people to talk: Almost every interview is with a firsthand witness, former associate or victim, which adds immeasurably to The Reckoning’s emotional power and credibility. Episode two features new revelations and harrowing new audio and video on the Bad Boy vs. Death Row feud which led to the murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G.; it’s required viewing if you still subscribe to the old conventional wisdom that Suge Knight was the bigger instigator.This Verge piece on how AI has become widely used in the Nashville songwriter scene is a great snapshot of a fast-moving space. It shows how songwriters are using tools like Suno to turn rough acoustic recordings into polished, full-band demos, with audio clips to illustrate. It means that writers don’t have to pay “track guys” $500-1000 to make a professional demo — and, of course, also means that local musicians are losing income, which has implications for the entire Music City ecosystem.
Semi-related: In an effort to get better information on how working musicians are using AI Water + Music (the research and blogging org who have been doing good work in music and tech for years) and software tool Moises are sponsoring this survey. Both AI skeptics and enthusiasts are welcome to take it, the only requirement is that you’re a working musician.
The World’s Finest Music-Themed Mini Crossword Puzzle: Week Eleven
Hunker down with a glass of nog, put on some Les McCann and enjoy Stems’ first somewhat-holiday-themed crossword puzzle.
To learn more about Stems, visit the About page. To learn more about my consulting practice, visit here.
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