Measure of Music

The fifth installment of the Measure of Music conference and hackathon was held from February 21-23, 2025, marking a special celebration of our fifth anniversary. Measure of Music is a virtual three-day weekend program to show the impact & importance of data across the music industry and to give current music execs, music industry hopefuls and industry career changers a crash course (and a finished project!) in music and data in collaboration with some of the most influential people and companies driving the democratization of music data around the world. To celebrate 5 years, we revisited some of the most memorable moments by bringing back fan-favorite speakers, including Cherie Hu, our keynote speaker from our inaugural year. The event also featured a revisit of popular panel discussions from previous years and a special retrospective keynote by our founder, Christine Osazuwa.

There were 91 project participants, 36 speakers, 11 weekend staff members, 33 mentors, 19 judges, 17 sponsors, and almost 2,000 spectators. Spectators watched the 15 talks and panels while hackathon participants had just 48 hours to put together a music data project that they presented to the judges and their peers with the help of mentors and staff throughout the weekend and data, project ideas (and prizes!) provided by sponsors. Our sponsors this year were Chartmetric, jump.global, The ROSTR Group, Songkick, The Orchard, Luminate, BandLab, Audoo, OFFstep, and Abbey Road REDD. Our location sponsors were Berklee College of Music in Boston and Abbey Road Institute in Boston. We had promotional & marketing support from Industry in Spanglish, Women in Music, BPI Innovation, The MUusic Managers Forum (MMF), and The Country Music Association (CMA).

Measure of Music is a conference & community that is reflective of the world. Of those almost 2000 registrations that disclosed, 62% were people of color or indigenous people, 60% are a gender minority, 39% have a first language other than or in addition to English, 25% identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community, 41% are under 30 years old, 70 countries are represented and 17 time zones were represented.

With 215 people registered to participate, only 91 project/hackathon participants made it to the end. Our participants came from 22 countries and were teamed together to create their projects. This year we brought back the artist project track which paired teams up with an emerging artist to develop a data-driven comprehensive artist development plan inclusive of community, financial & marketing plans, a mailing list, and a website. Outside of the artist projects, participants were free to choose their own topics. Overall, the topics widely fell into these areas: Music Creation & Artist Development, focused on tools, products & ideas built to make the creation of music and artist development better & easier, and Live & Global focused on products, tools & ideas focused on live music, touring and international expansion/growth.

Our project participants come back year after year! 21% of this years' project participants have been participants in the past and 39% have been involved (spectator, previous participant, etc.) with Measure of Music in at least one of the previous years. This year, numerous past participants as hackathon mentors and we also had two past project participants as speakers. Michele Valentini, a year one participant, now A&R & Data Lead, Atlantic Records UK after being hired by a past Measure of Music mentor, joined our Data-Driven A&R panel. Grant Gregory, now Research Manager at Luminate, has represented the company, as a speaker, for the past 3 years after engaging with the company as a year 2 participant. All of this is a testament to the strength of this community. 

Our first-place team presented a project called "GigAtlas" presented on a simplified, data-driven tour planning that puts artists in control of their journey. Our second-place team presented a project called "PITCH IT", a dynamic, modular one-sheet creator that tailors data-driven tools for growing artists. Our third-place team presented an artist project focused on the artist Syante, focused on social media rebranding for her new EP Release by structuring a marketing plan. 

We also had two locations for project participants to meet in-person to collaborate with their teams. Our location sponsors were Berklee College of Music, offering up space on their Boston campus with one team working on site and Abbey Road Institute, offering up their campus in London with two teams including an artist project team focused on emerging artist Megan Black. Our sponsors Abbey Road REDD also offered up a tour of Abbey Road Studios to in-person London participants on the day the conference started. 

London hackathon participants at their Abbey Road Studios Tour

Measure of Music Founder, Christine Osazuwa and Hackathon Participants & Weekend Support in London

We brought back our networking expo which allowed both participants, spectators, and contributors to connect. The full networking expo included the community booths, sponsor booths, company & artist career fair booths (with the artist career fair focused on artist finding team members & support). The community booths were held by Industry In Spanglish, RAMPD, The B.A.K Play.Ground, Andes Collective, Girls Behind The Rock Show and Women in Jazz Media.  Our career far companies included The Orchard, Kobalt Music, and Jobs by ROSTR. Our career fair artists were CZAR, Syante, Special Purpose. We also included virtual speed networking and free flow virtual connecting to start or end each day.

Our content for the weekend consisted of talks, panels and keynote sessions:

Day 1's tech day explored key tools & tech in the music industry with presentations and talks from Audoo, Songkick, Chartmetric, Luminate and BandLab. We closed Friday with a panel discussions focused on data-driven A&R and as a way to celebrate year 5, we had a panel that reached beyond music to explore entertainment data as a whole with speakers in the TV and online media space. 

To start Day 2, we had our startup showcase where early start music tech startups HAT Music, SONAR Labs, Music Link and GATELESS got to share their companies with the Measure of Music community. We followed that up with our hands-on tech workshop, Intro to Music Data Management, Analysis & Visualization. Our keynote discussion with Cherie Hu (Founder, Water & Music) was a reprisal of her year 1 keynote talk and focused on looking back and exploring what's next in music & tech. We followed that with a topic we also explored in 2021, "The Modern Music Company", with a keynote fireside chat with Jenn Hurst (SVP, MDDN) and Martha Earls (Owner, Neon Coast) exploring what hybrid label, management, and all round artist support companies look like in 2025.

Our final day was about community with our annual research in music panel which had topics covering artist mental health, radio & country music, and music trigger cities. Our final talk of the day was a keynote interview with Measure of Music's founder Christine Osazuwa, which explored the past 5 years of Measure of Music, how we got to that point, and what's next. We closed Day 3 with our hackathon projects.

As with previous years, we had no all-male or all white panels. In fact, our speakers, participants & spectators were majority-minority in both gender and race and we had several all women and all people of color panels. Our hackathon mentors and judges came from major music, media and tech companies ranging from major players to startups from across the world including the Sony Music Entertainment, EMPIRE, Nettwerk Music Group, Believe, Downtown Music, The BPI & more; while participants ranged from those with little to no tech experience to people that have worked in music, tech & data for years with only 18% of participants under 25 years old.

Hackathon participants were provided with data from sponsoring companies Songkick, Chartmetric, Luminate and Audoo. Hackathon and artist prizes were provided by sponsoring companies as well as friends of Measure of Music, Highnote, The Amani Experience and Neon Culture.

This year, thanks to our sponsors and audience donations, we were able to raise $30,690 which allowed us to offer payment to our speakers and weekend staff and to provide a cash prize to our hackathon winners and the artists involved with our artist project track. Measure of Music Conference & Workshop will return next Winter.  

2025 Press: Music Ally, Trapital, Hypebot, Billboard, Hypebot (Post-Coverage)