The word insight may now be one of the most misused words in the music business, and for that matter, the sports business.
Open almost any marketing presentation and you will find a slide labelled “Insights.”
Spotify streams increased by 14%.
Supporters who attend four matches are more likely to buy a replica shirt.
Vinyl buyers also spend more on concert tickets.
Fans aged 18 - 24 prefer short-form video.
These may all be useful pieces of information, but they’re not necessarily insights. What they actually are is evidence: observations, patterns and correlations. Things that happened.
Insight begins when we uncover the human explanation behind what happened—and that explanation changes what we decide to do next.
SO, WHAT ACTUALLY IS AN INSIGHT?
Let’s say someone visits the same café every Saturday and orders the same breakfast.
The transactional data tells us what they bought, how much they spent, what time they arrived and how frequently they returned. From that behaviour, we might conclude that they love the food, but perhaps the breakfast is fairly average.
Perhaps they return because the staff know their name and remember their order, making them feel recognised in a way that rarely happens elsewhere. Perhaps the café’s design, lighting and atmosphere quietly echo a place they once loved in Greenwich Village, somewhere that felt like a refuge from the rest of the city. Or perhaps, average as the breakfast may be, the fried bread is “just the way my Nanna made it when I was a kid.”
The behaviour is the same. The meaning is completely different.
And once we understand that meaning, our decisions become different too. We stop thinking only about price, portion size and promotional offers. We start thinking about memory, ritual, familiarity, welcome and emotional connection.
That is the power of insight. It reveals the reason hiding beneath the action.
WHAT DATA CAN - AND CANNOT - TELL US
Look, everyone is getting feverishly excited, and slightly weak at the knees, about behavioural, consumption and transactional data. Don’t get me wrong: it is extraordinarily valuable. I mean, they can tell an artist:
Who streamed a track
Who bought a ticket
Who opened an email
Who purchased the vinyl
Which city generated the greatest response
And in sport, they can tell a club:
Who attended
Which fixtures they selected
What merchandise they bought
Whether they used the app
How frequently they returned
But the data cannot necessarily tell us:
Why the artist matters to them
What the club represents within their identity
Why they chose one experience over another
Why they did not return
What would make them recommend it to someone else
What they believe, need, fear or aspire to
What else occupies their time, attention and money
What might turn an interested observer into a committed fan
The dashboard records the action, but it doesn’t automatically explain the person.
ALRIGHT…SO HOW DO WE UNCOVER INSIGHT?
Easy: by speaking to people. Listening to them. Observing them. Exploring their lives beyond the immediate transaction.
Qualitative research helps us uncover the language, tensions, emotions, motivations and misconceptions that cannot be found in a behavioural dataset.
Quantitative research then helps us understand how widespread those attitudes are, which audience groups hold them and where the greatest opportunities may exist.
The strongest insight usually comes from combining multiple forms of evidence, certainly not by declaring a winner between “data” and “research.”
The behavioural data shows us where to look.
Human research helps us understand what we are looking at.
Strategic interpretation determines what we should do about it.
That is why the world’s largest consumer businesses continue to invest heavily in insight despite possessing extraordinary volumes of customer data. They understand that knowing what people bought yesterday is not enough to determine what they might want tomorrow.
WHY THIS MATTERS FOR MUSIC AND SPORT
Both industries are investing heavily in CRM, fan-engagement platforms, loyalty programmes, communities and increasingly sophisticated customer databases. That is positive.
But we are in danger of confusing better infrastructure with better audience understanding.
A CRM can record what fans bought. An engagement platform can identify which content generated the most clicks. A sports organisation can combine ticketing, retail, hospitality and digital behaviour into a “single customer view.”
Yet none of those systems can automatically explain why someone cares, whether the proposition was right or where the next audience will come from.
We may achieve a single customer view without ever seeing the fan as a whole person.
Cause not all eggs are the same...?
FROM ASSUMPTION TO OPPORTUNITY
Real insight does more than explain existing behaviour. It can uncover unmet needs, expose misconceptions, identify barriers, reveal latent demand and show us where future audiences could come from.
It enables an artist, club or rights-holder to ask better questions:
Who else could care about this?
Why don’t they care yet?
What role could we play in their world?
What experience, product, partnership or message would create genuine value?
That is the difference between repeatedly targeting the people already inside the system and discovering new routes to growth.
Data tells us what fans did.
Insight helps us understand why they did it, what they might do next, and what we should do differently as a result.
NEXT WEEK:
Owning fan data is not the same as understanding fans.
And your CRM, however expensive, cannot introduce you to the people who have never entered it.