Hi,

This week’s newsletter is dedicated to sharing a new tool I built with AI - it’s the latest installment in a catalog of tools I’m building to help artists and their teams.

This tool is probably my favorite yet and I’m super excited to share it. Let’s get into it below.

Let’s dive in ⬇️

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article talking about the importance of knowing the game that you’re playing. Whether you’re an artist, creator, executive, or creative professional…there are different strategies and blueprints you can follow dependent on your goals and your specific game.

I described the difference in artists playing the streaming game (and how they play it) and artists playing the direct-to-fan product game. Both are very different strategies with the same goal - earn a living through music.

In my conversations with artists and their teams, I find that a common theme is many have no idea the game they’re playing - there’s no strategy, blueprint, or plan. Streaming has kind of just become the default game so artists think a lot of streams is the default metric of success without any real understanding of how to achieve that.

Part of why building a strategy is so challenging is because it’s hard to know what information to look for and even if you do, that information is likely fragmented. It can feel overwhelming and scary to try and understand how other artists are finding success in the sea of the internet.

To try and help alleviate this, I built a tool called CADENCE.

By using Claude Code, Spotify’s API, and Shopify’s API, it outlines the release strategy for any artist by studying their release schedule and breaks down in a simple way what their approach is. From that approach, artists and their teams can synthesize that information to see what works for them.

I thought it’d be fun to use Russ as an example - a true independent artist who has had an aggressive release schedule for years.

HERE is a link to the tool.

Landing on the homepage gives you the ability to paste the artist’s Spotify profile link so that CADENCE can scan their profile. It also gives you the option to paste their merch store link so CADENCE can scan and analyze their merch store strategy.

The header of the homepage gives a brief overview of the artist’s release strategy throughout their career (how many total career releases, how many releases per year, and how much space in between).

The Takeaways section then provides a summary of their release strategy based on scanning the artist Spotify profile and scanning their release date cadence. The timeline section is broken down into 2 separate tabs:

Here’s an example of how Russ’ looks:

The Timeline section shows an exact timeline of their release schedule for the last 2 years and their entire career broken down by singles and albums. What I personally find helpful is the dates - it gives you a sense of how often these artists are releasing and how far apart.

If you’re an artist trying to play the streaming game or trying to understand why other artist’s are having success on streaming, this tab can help paint a little bit of the picture.

This tab shows a quick overview of how many releases per year the artist has released - it can be helpful to see how aggressively they’ve been releasing / when they’ve been most active throughout their career.

The Catalog tab analyzes the copyright line of each release on Spotify to examine where each piece of the catalog sits (ie what labels, distributors, etc). Please note this only reflects forward-facing information on the P+C line and does not have any insight into where it’s actually distributed through. This information is pulled directly from Spotify.

This is one of my favorite tabs - it analyzes an artist’s merch store (if it’s on Shopify) using Shopify’s API and helps explain their merch strategy.

At the top of the page is a summary of what types of products they’re selling and what categories.

It then shows their lowest priced item, highest priced, and average along with examples of each.

The bottom of the Merch tab helps explain what we’re looking at.

It’s important to note that all of this information is publicly available - I’m not revealing anything that’s secretive or disclosed. It’s pulled from Spotify & Shopify APIs scanning public information that anyone can access.

The manual version of this would be going to Russ’ Spotify profile and manually looking at his release dates or scanning his merch store.

Here’s an example of a use case for how to use it:

Understanding how the game is being played can help you create your own version of how to play it that’s authentic to you.

What do you think? I’d love to know if something like this is helpful or if I’m just nerding out and wasting my time haha.

Hopefully, this was helpful on your journey.

Thanks for reading, until next time.