And The Writer Is...with Ross Golan - Ep. 205: Sung Cho of Chartmetric

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

We’re excited to announce a special bonus interview with Sung Cho, the CEO & Founder of our incredible sponsor, Chartmetric. Ross recently sat down with Sung to discuss how his company is building the world’s best analytics team in the music industry. Read below to find out more about Chartmetric and listen to this conversation on any platform you find your podcasts!Chartmetric is the all-in-one platform for artists and music industry professionals, providing comprehensive streaming, social, and audience data. Since 2016, Chartmetric has strived to ensure everyone can have a successful career in music. Their easy-to-understand and powerful analytics on over 10 million artists and 100 million tracks will help answer all of your questions, from tracking your stats to discovering new talents. From playlist placements to stream counts to follower demographics and much more, it’s never been easier to understand how your artists fit in the music industry, and how they can grow. What’s even better is that Chartmetric does the work for you, providing actionable insights and beautiful visuals on their up-to-date global data from over 15 different social and streaming platforms. Find out more at chartmetric.com! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey everybody, we are doing a little special episode with our friend Sung Cho from ChartMetric. ChartMetric has been a supporter of the podcast now for two years and we use it in every single interview and we use it in between our interviews when we're posting about the guests that we have and we thought it would be an opportunity for all of you out there to listen. to some talk about why chart metric is so good at what it does. So let's start there. What's the origin of chart metric? I mean, obviously we've used it, but how did it start? It's a nine years journey. Thanks for asking.

So we started with tracking some social media, followings, some playlist analytics, but now we have evolved as a platform. that can cover all kinds of radio stats and Pandora data we have as well, Sirius XM data, all the playlist stats across four platforms. It's a really comprehensive platform now. What made you want to start this? I've been a fan of music.

I'm not from the music industry. I have technical background. I used to be a soft engineer and then a product manager at a large, tech company in Silicon Valley. Music is something that I always appreciated, always have been with me, and a lot of people would relate to this. But I wanted to contribute more than anything else. These artists, I have always been fascinated by especially those competition shows. The Voice or America's got talent, Britain's got talents, all kinds of these shows. They have some amateur artists or sometimes professional artists' singers coming on stage. And they have this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to show their talent to the audience.

And only a few can be selected to go into the next stage. but I've seen just too many talents who are too great to be rejected on the stage and they could have a bright future career as musicians. So I began to wonder, what if there is an opportunity, there is a way to help them show their talent and also help them on the business side.

A lot of these are talented businesses, but they're not necessarily good at, They don't have that resource to have that support, artist management or record labels. So how about we make it a little easier for them to do it as a DIY, analyze their own numbers, and present more importantly, present their numbers persuasively to music curators, radio stations, just like has professionals do. So that was the motivation.

That was the beginning. Yeah, I know a lot of our listeners have tried it, but if you haven't been on chart metric or you haven't used it, it's so brilliant in the way that it lifts the veil on how the music industry does its analysis. And on whatever level you're at, it really gives you a comprehensive view of how your songs are interacting,

on social media, how they're interacting on DSPs, how they're interacting with radio. You know, it can range from obviously the biggest artist in the world to anybody who has a presence. And it's really thorough. One of our artists has been spending more and more time doing analysis of his social media. And the more he's able to see how songs interact, he realized, well, I'm going to do less posts and add more of the, just the amount of information you can get from a chart metric is so brilliant. It's so thorough. So I think you're achieving your goal as far as, you know,

all the different aspects to releasing music in 2025 even. Thank you. I think you're achieving. achieving that well. Being a part of a nine-year journey, the team at Chartmetric is great. But why are they, what makes you most proud of the team that you have at Chartmetric? We are data nerds, most of us are, but also the law of music. For example, our designer, product designer, he never misses, what is it, like, you know, these

like, you know, shows that have his favorite artists. And so we go to those events, concerts, we root for the musicians we love, but also we are data nerds. So we

help with deciphering, interpreting the boring part of the music industry, like the data. So some other people may find it sexy, but we find it incredibly fascinating and interesting. So it's our job to spend hours and hours looking at the data really makes sense out of it

and create some machine learning model to help also predict the future. So these are all what we do. Of course, presenting the data in a visually attractive way, that's something we are also obsessed with. For example, we have this Instagram account, sometimes going viral. When the artist releases a new album, we post a nice video of what happened

before and after the album release. And we also have this blog called How Music Charts. Most recently, we posted this article about Charlie X-CX. Her Brat Summer is not over album. album, how this new album impacted so many other artists, monthly listener account, as well as her own career. It's a fascinating read, but you don't have to read them all because there are some nice charts showing. For example, John Hopkins had the biggest monthly listener increase after the album release, followed by BB Tricks, Bloody, and other artists. And we also talk about how, you know, like how many additional monthly listeners or streams, this new remix album gained compared to the original album.

We show them side by side so that artists and songwriters can understand the impact of these experiments. Interesting new experiments are happening all the time. but what's actually happening on the business side, it takes forever to understand. So we just simply explain them in plain languages. That's what we try to do. Yeah, it's very clear. And again, you can go onto chartmetric site, chartmetric.com, and you can check out the blog from there. But it is really thorough, and it helps for the visualizer to see some of these charts.

And the Brat Summer blog post was fascinating. You know, some of the other questions that I'm trying to figure out is like you get all these numbers. And when I have these young artists who come in and say, how do I do it? You know, it's one thing when you're able to analyze it from the top, which is essential for labels for the big artists. Right. What advice do you give independent newer artists who are just in the industry? Yeah, obviously, for independent new artists, there's not a ton of data to analyze. It's one at a time, but what I want to advise is having that presence across different platform.

It's obviously difficult to have that without an army of support around. But what we notice and realize, when we speak to the A&R side, they really care about this organic growth and also the cross-platform performance. When you are a big, like a, you know, your song is blowing up on TikTok and suddenly you got millions of streams. It feels like something. But do you actually have fans or listeners? on other platforms. So having the right balance across different platforms that proves how marketable you are to the fans

and how repeatable your successes would be for labels. And they use them as a prediction feature. So that's one advice I want to give. And another thing is somebody on this podcast also mentioned, There is no overnight success. When you see someone suddenly becoming big, it means that that person has been working on that, you know, work for the past 10 years already.

So we see a lot of artists there going up slow, slow, slow, slow, very slow until they actually become bigger. Yeah, I mean, Charlie is a good example of that. Totally. When we first started writing together was 2013, and she had had, you know, a couple hits, but they were features or they were, you know, one was from a movie, boom, clap. And so it wasn't really, people weren't necessarily connecting the whole brand of who she is, but she worked on it for so long. And so when you see something like this whole response to Bratt and Brad Summer, the whole thing is due to just her incredible perseverance. She's just the best.

When you look at what you guys have done over the last nine years versus where you're going, I know you're talking about the predictive nature of data, is the goal for the next nine years to become a tool of prediction? What do you see the next half of geometric? Music industry is a hit-driven business, like movies and movies. TV shows and any other entertainment industries. Same. So it's really tough to predict the future in the end.

And the artist's own career, it's just, you know, we've tried multiple times. But we don't want to claim that someday we can predict the future, the success of the artists. What we are focusing more on is to making it easier to, recognize the patterns or making it easier to answer those questions. For example, right now we are building an AI engine using by training with all of our data that you can just go in and ask plain questions and get answers and get inspired. Also another thing we want to have and we have we have have something already is having that all these historical data so that from there, we map

those data with important events. So you can see what those events, how those events influenced the growth of an artist. Those big moments on TikTok or those big playlist moments, they are all recorded in our database. So that's something we want to continue to accumulate. Yeah, it doesn't have to necessarily predict a hit as much as it can help your batting average move up. I think this is the same thing as even when you're writing a song when we talk about math a lot when you write songs. And, you know, the point of that isn't necessarily, one is I think it's better for the audience, which is who we're all working for here. but it's the idea of building your batting average so the songs are better it's not that it guarantees that everything's a hit is that if you have 10 more songs that of those 10 songs some of those will be more successful than the 10 previously if you use better math and you know so the data analyzing the release of songs and analyzing the creation of songs aren't

so far off where you know it's really about trends and more about that than it is necessarily this one thing is going to be you know when you're in a session and somebody in the room's like this is a smash it's like

you need about a hundred of those for one to actually be a smash and it's the same thing when you're analyzing 100 releases why is this one a smash both of those things can work hand in hand so for songwriters who are listening that's where it can be really useful

is when you look even, not just the songs that you've released as an artist, but the songs that other artists have released, where you can see why have those been successful in comparison to their other songs? Why have those songs been not successful compared to the other songs, listening

through and kind of recognizing, oh, that's interesting. This was more successful than Spotify shows because it really reacted over here. And this is really, you know, radio really liked it. Why did radio like it? But DSPs didn't. All these things you can start to analyze if you have the data. And that's what chart metric does really well. It's super clear. So, you know, again, I'm not encouraging people to use it because you're on. I'm encouraging people to use it because it's really an amazing tool. Thank you. So I appreciate you supporting the podcast,

but I also just just introducing it to me and my career and and you know I know the podcast we use it regularly so so thank you so much that's amazing thank you