Dark Arts is an agency at the forefront of audience services for iconic artists with culturally important music catalogues. Operating at the crossroads of legacy and innovation, they ensure their clients flourish in the ever-evolving digital landscape. 

Through Media Cymru funding, Dark Arts is exploring challenges the music industry faces in leveraging historic catalogue music.

Joe tells us how embracing research and development has been transformational for his business.  

Joe Howden, Director of Dark Arts Digital:

Exploring current challenges for iconic music catalogues…

My name is Joe Howden, I’m the Director of Dark Arts. We are an audience services agency working in the music industry and typically, we work with iconic artists with storied catalogues. We manage all digital touchpoints for our clients including social media channels, websites, streaming profiles and anywhere else that an artist comes into contact with an audience online. 

Last year, we started a project to explore the challenges that the catalogue side of the music business faces. This turned into a research and development (R&D) project, supported by Media Cymru.   

Advanced Digital Healthcheck – A Transformative Tool for the Music Industry 

As the internet evolves, artists face the challenge of keeping their IP up-to-date with current technologies, trends and modern standards and formats. We’ve noticed this challenge in our work, so through our R&D project we’ve explored a number of ways of addressing this in order to ensure that our clients’ digital footprints are globally competitive. 

We developed a health check which enables us to establish the quality of an artist’s digital footprint in a number of different areas, with 190+ data points measured across web and social platforms, streaming and YouTube. This developed into a second project, the development of a tool which audits a YouTube channel and every video on it and establishes all the optimisation possibilities that there are across all the uploaded content.  

We found out lots about this problem through talking to our clients and contacts working in catalogue departments at record labels across the music industry and the more we found out about it, the more we understood that pinpointing these optimisations quickly and easily is crucial for the music industry, which is typically very overworked.  

Catalogue departments have hundreds of thousands of songs and videos to take care of at any one time. For them to fully understand the scope of what they need to do to keep one particular artist’s works up to date requires a lot of bandwidth. So, our approach was to try and make it as easy as possible for the industry to see what the problems are so they can fix them in a targeted, effective way. 

As a result of R&D funding, our digital tool is being used by our company internally and is also available as a service that can be bought from us. We have already found that the prototype we’re using saves our company many hours of work with better accuracy and no risk of human error. We’re able to produce a report of up to 150 videos in about thirty minutes when previously it would have taken one of our team a day. There are huge benefits for our company and for our clients who we are now able to support with a cutting edge tool that no one else has. And in addition to that, the tool is generating interest from artists, management companies, record labels and rights holder companies who all have a vested interest in identifying and fixing problems on YouTube as well. 

Investing in R&D creates new opportunities 

Investing in R&D created an opportunity at our company that didn’t exist before. It allowed us to create a niche and brand ourselves as a catalogue focussed company which differentiates us from other agencies. It also created revenue streams that didn’t previously exist as well as tools which are innovative within the industry and which save a huge amount of time for all involved. On lots of levels it’s been an extremely valuable process and it’s shaped the company into what it now is.  

We’re now a catalogue-focused company because of the R&D journey we went on. We are now prioritising R&D as a business which has given us a chance to look in depth at our area of music in a way we hadn’t previously. We are asking questions and exploring challenges in order to try and push our industry forward and this is providing new revenue streams, making us and our clients better equipped for the future and putting us out there as one of the leading companies in this space.  

A direct benefit of this R&D for artists would be the opportunity to update their video catalogue to keep it fresh and discoverable. The internet is ever evolving and videos on YouTube need to be kept up-to-date periodically to keep pace. When this isn’t done, a video which was uploaded years ago at a standard resolution for the time, will not be as competitive in the algorithm as a video that was uploaded in HD or 4K last week. Over time, the video will generate fewer views each month and, in the worst case scenario, will slowly fade into obscurity. And this is just one example.  

In the art world, pieces of great artwork are taken away to be restored and cleaned and are then re-presented in the best possible way for viewers to enjoy. The same is true of video and audio in the music industry. Music IP needs to be kept up-to-date and not left to gather dust. If we want people to continue enjoying it, we need to take care of it. 

“Innovation is crucial for the Welsh creative sector” 

If you are not innovating then you are simply being led by those who are. To lead, you need to be focusing on R&D so for the Welsh creative sector to flourish, investment in innovation is absolutely critical. I feel like we’re at the start of a very exciting story for the Welsh media sector, and it’s only going to get better.  

Media Cymru × Dark Arts 

Working with Media Cymru has been really important. It’s taken the process of R&D – which we were doing to some extent – and it has formalised it and added accountability, which has meant we’ve been able to push forward and complete projects that we started.   

Working with PDR has been brilliant in helping us to formalise our thinking and approach to R&D and they’ve collaborated with us through both Media Cymru projects that we’ve done. We also worked with Alacrity Foundation on the business side, and with a data scientist, who has helped us with various aspects of the YouTube tool. 

My view of R&D before working with Media Cymru was very unclear. I really wasn’t sure what it actually was but it turns out I’ve been doing it all along, albeit in a haphazard way. Having spent so much time over the last couple of years refining my approach, thinking about it, working with my team, Media Cymru and the various partners they have and constantly talking to my clients about it, it’s clear to me how powerful and transformational R&D can be. I and Dark Arts have fully embraced it as a result and that’s the way it’s going to stay.  

If you are embarking on a similar R&D journey… 

My lessons learned would be to not hold on too tightly to whatever it is you think the project is going to be. Our project had twists and turns and what we ended up with was not what we thought we were going to do. But we followed the research and let it direct the project and we ended up with something we never thought we would have because of that.  

If I had to give one piece of advice to a company starting an R&D journey it would be to ask questions, not assume you know what needs to be developed, but ask the people who are going to be using it what they need. 

About Dark Arts Digital 

Dark Arts is a vanguard agency at the forefront of audience services for iconic artists with storied music catalogues. Operating at the crossroads of legacy and innovation, Dark Arts ensure that clients flourish in the ever-evolving digital landscape. 

Before founding Dark Arts in 2014, Joe Howden was working with Björk on the pioneering Biophilia multimedia album project. This experience of helping one of the world’s most original artists and innovators to realise such a groundbreaking digital project was the inspiration for the company. 

Dark Arts is all about championing great artistry and helping it to thrive through compelling storytelling, proactive innovation and continuous improvement. The industry, platforms, technologies, trends and approaches evolve, but their underlying ethos remains the same.  

Dark Arts are passionate about the catalogue side of the business so they invest in research and development to better understand the challenges faced by catalogue departments, rights holders and artists. Their specialism in evergreen marketing and digital optimisation have grown from their belief that iconic music and stories should be a focus all year round, not just during a promotional cycle.