Feed Me Data: ForTunes Offers Artists Distilled Engagement Insights via an Affordable Mobile App

"Every artist we asked said they wanted data," recalls Florian Richling, artist, producer, and founder of ForTunes. "But none of them seemed to want to interact with data on a regular basis. At least not in the way it's traditionally presented." ForTunes, the data analytics app built for music creators, makes analyzing an artist's online presence as easy as checking a Twitter feed.

Founded in 2018, ForTunes is the artist's choice for most intuitive and best value for music data analytics. Developed in Vienna by Richling and label and college radio veteran Christoph Muck, ForTunes is the insights app that has the data artists want, with the interface and ingenuity that gives them what they need.

Rather than presenting users with a dashboard of numbers, charts, and spinning dials, Richling and Muck decided to present artists with data via a familiar-feeling newsfeed. Much like Twitter or Instagram, ForTunes sends notifications that inform artists of important benchmarks, achievements, and other key moments revealed in the data, achievements they can easily share to their socials. The approach worked: ForTunes has 100,000 app sessions each month by artists from over 130 countries.

"We built ForTunes to be an app by artists for artists," says Richling, Co-Founder of ForTunes, a former label manager who also scored platinum and gold singles as a sound engineer. "It's an all-in-one data platform to measure every aspect of your online presence as an artist, from your social feeds and followers, to your streams and playlist apps. It is the app I wish I had as a young artist and producer."

Richling's passion for music began young and took him to the famed Vienna Conservatory. He turned to audio engineering and production, starting a small studio in a recession and launching a label. His label activities led him to cross paths with Muck, who was working for Sony Austria heading up their digital efforts. They both saw the gap in data for artists in the industry. The pair teamed up and launched ForTunes in the middle of the pandemic. They were met with a tremendous groundswell of artists support, signaling that despite what industry leaders assumed, recording and performing artists do actually care about the data of their music.

ForTunes' data offerings rival every major competitor out there at a fraction of the price. "What separates us from our competitors is that we want ForTunes to be accessible and affordable for the long haul," says Muck, ForTunes Co-Founder and former Senior Manager of Digital Business at Sony Music Austria. "When we launched in 2018, we were seeing really expensive apps and tools, but nothing made specifically for the rising artist. We have a $7.99/month premium user price, but we pride ourselves on our free tier, which is packed with value and will always be free."

Fan-generated social posts, music blogs, and YouTube videos and comments are gathered and presented as a newsfeed, making it easy to keep up with every aspect of an artist's reach. At the Premium level, ForTunes gives artists perhaps one of the most useful tools in modern music streaming history: ForTunes not only tracks playlists adds, but also uses granular song data to identify well-suited playlists that can organically boost an artist's fanbase. ForTunes playlist suggestion feature is already being dubbed the best solution out there by industry leaders.

"If you are a music industry newcomer, you may not have as much data as those who have been around for a long time," said Richling. "We're trying to show these young artists how to play the music streaming game, by teaching them, first, how to play the data game. By using our app, artists will quickly find that fan engagement is more important than fanbase size or number of followers. Engagement is a new currency. And our app gives artists the best and most intuitive way to measure engagement."

ForTunes started its mission in 2018 to improve the lives of millions of music creators worldwide. Built and developed by a team of music and tech enthusiasts, ForTunes empowers independent artists with cross-platform music data analytics and data-driven career recommendations to optimize decision making and increase revenues.

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