Hi ,
Imagine you're Metallica's data scientist.
If asked, Metallica would probably tell you they're in the business of selling recorded music and concert tickets. Yet, with the rise of streaming services, such as Spotify, combined with the hit to ticket sales caused by COVID, many artists now make more money from merchandise sales than from their music itself.
According to this article, music merchandise sales exceeded $3.5bn globally in 2018.
Here's the thing...
If you're trying to increase Metallica's profits, you may think the best way to do so is by increasing their music downloads or ticket sales. But this will only increase profits if the people who buy the tickets or download the songs also buy band merchandise.
A better approach, may, in fact, be to focus on increasing t-shirt sales.
Part of getting the right solution to a data science problem is making sure you focus on the right metrics.
Talk again soon,
Dr Genevieve Hayes.
p.s. This post was inspired by a conversation I recently had with Rob Deutch on Value Driven Data Science. You can listen to the entire conversation HERE.
