Measure of Music

The sixth installment of the Measure of Music conference and hackathon was held from February 20-22, 2026. This year marks the final year of this version of the event (more on that in the closing talk). 

Measure of Music is a virtual three-day weekend program to show the impact & importance of data across the music industry and to give current music execs, music industry hopefuls and industry career changers a crash course (and a finished project!) in music and data in collaboration with some of the most influential people and companies driving the democratization of music data around the world. Year 6 included keynote conversations from Sang Cho (Co-Founder & COO of KAI Media and hello82) about the power of K-Pop, fandom and in person activations and a keynote with Chissy Nkemere Cherian (Rock, Alt, Metal & Indie Artist Partnerships at Spotify) where we had a conversation about rock music, belonging and identity.

There were 74 project participants, 38 speakers, 11 weekend staff members, 22 mentors, 15 judges, 6 sponsors, and almost 1,500 spectators. Spectators watched the 15 talks and panels while hackathon participants had just 48 hours to put together a music data project that they presented to the judges and their peers with the help of mentors and staff throughout the weekend and data, project ideas (and prizes!) provided by sponsors. Our sponsors this year were Chartmetric, The ROSTR Group, The Orchard, Luminate, and Abbey Road REDD. Our location sponsor was Abbey Road Institute in London. 

Measure of Music Founder, Christine Osazuwa and Hackathon Participants & Weekend Support in London

Measure of Music is a conference & community that is reflective of the world. Of those almost 1,500 registrations that disclosed, 61% were people of color or indigenous people, 62% are a gender minority, 38% have a first language other than or in addition to English, 23% identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community, 35% are under 30 years old, 63 countries are represented and 15 time zones were represented.

With 200 people registered to participate, only 74 project/hackathon participants made it to the end. Our participants came from 15 countries and were teamed together to create their projects across 16 groups. This year we brought back the artist project track presented by The Orchard which paired teams up with an emerging artist to develop a data-driven comprehensive artist development plan inclusive of community, financial & marketing plans, a mailing list, and a website. Outside of the artist projects, participants were free to choose their own topics. Overall, the topics widely fell into these areas: Revenue & Projections with projects focused on helping artists’ and their teams find revenue and opportunities for growth, and Coordination, Collaboration & Community, with projects focused on tools that enhance & support artists. Every project featured data from our presenting sponsor, Chartmetric leveraging their vast & varied database of streaming, charts, playlisting, live music, demographic data and more.

Our project participants come back year after year! Of those that completed their projects, 22% of this years' project participants have been participants in the past and 38% have been involved (spectator, previous participant, etc.) with Measure of Music in at least one of the previous years. This year, numerous past participants as hackathon mentors and we also had a past project participants as a speaker. Grant Gregory, now Research Manager at Luminate, has represented the company, as a speaker, for the past 4 years after engaging with the company as a year 2 participant. All of this is a testament to the strength of this community.

The Winner Projects:

• Our first-place team presented a project called "RemixRadar" was a tool to help artists and their teams spot high performing remixes and bootlegs in order to turn them into licensed revenue.
• Our second-place team presented a project called "Commusicly", a platform designed to help artists connect with the wider music community.
• Our third-place team presented an artist project focused on the artist Oreo Jones, and explored how the artist could leverage connections, digital marketing, and community events to evolve his project

We also had a location for project participants to meet in-person to collaborate with their teams. Our location sponsors was Abbey Road Institute, offering up their campus in London with three teams including an artist project team focused on South African alt/pop artist, Moonchild Sanelly. Our sponsors Abbey Road REDD also offered up a tour of Abbey Road Studios to in-person London participants on the day before the conference started.

We brought back our networking expo which allowed both participants, spectators, and contributors to connect. The full networking expo included the community booths, sponsor booths, company & artist career fair booths (with the artist career fair focused on artist finding team members & support). The community booths were held by Rock & Metal Alliance, Girls Behind The Rock Show, and Women in Jazz Media.  Our career fair companies included The Orchard, GATELESS, One Three PR House, and Jobs by ROSTR. Our career fair artists were Kemi Sulola, SOZI, Syante and Sarey Savy. Most of which played double duty and Kemi was also a speaker, SOZI and Sarey Savy were both artist project subjects, and while not participating this year, Syante was our artist project winner last year. We also included virtual speed networking and free flow virtual connecting to start or end each day.

Our content for the weekend consisted of talks, panels and keynote sessions:

Day 1's tech day explored key tools & tech in the music industry with presentations and talks from Chartmetric, Luminate, and Jeff Green presenting his platform The Metrics of Music. We closed Friday with panel discussions focused on bias in data. We also had part 1 of our “Sustaining” series that explores all of the key players that power the music industry that may not be the biggest and flashiest names but are important to the ecosystem of music and also need the music ecosystem to support them. The series kicked off with Sustaining a Music Startup. We closed out our first day with a keynote conversation with Sang Cho (Co-Founder & COO, KAI Media and hello82)  interviewed by Lashai Ben Salmi (Co-Founder, Hallyu Con by Ouri Insights) in a conversation about K-Pop coming to the West and why it’s bigger than just a genre.

Day 2, we had our networking expo also had our startup showcase where early start music tech startups Encore Music, COMP Music and Plates got to share their companies with the Measure of Music community. We followed that up with our hands-on tech workshop, Predicting Catalogue Breakouts Before They Hit: A Data-Led Workshop. We followed that with the next in our “Sustaining” series focused on Artist Careers with a special focus on mid-level artists and what support they need and areas they should focus on. We also had a live panel focused on not just selling tickets but getting people to turn up and return by giving them incredible experiences online & offline. Our final panel of the day was an exploration on ways artists can finance their career through alternative means such as grants, licensing and sponsorship. And we closed out Saturday’s programming with a keynote discussion with Chissy Nkemere Cherian (Rock, Alternative, Metal, & Indie Artist Partnerships at Spotify) where we explored identity & belonging through rock music and what the industry can learn from mid-level rock artists.

Our final day brought back our annual research in music panel which had topics covering mid-level artists, Taylor Swift and marketing in Asian markets. Our final talk of the day was the third and last part in our “Sustaining” series focused on the state of hiring and professional development in the music industry. We closed Day 3 with our hackathon projects.

As with previous years, we had no all-male or all white panels. In fact, our speakers were 71% women and 66% people of color and we have several panels that were all people of color. In addition, our participants & spectators were majority-minority in both gender and race. Our hackathon mentors and judges came from major music, media and tech companies ranging from major players to startups from across the world including the Sony Music, Duetti, Spotify, TaP Music, Epidemic Sound,  Google, and more; while participants ranged from those with little to no tech experience to people that have worked in music, tech & data for years with only 14% of participants under 25 years old.

Hackathon participants were provided with data from sponsoring companies Chartmetric and Luminate. As well as access provided by our friends at Jambase and Royalt.io.

This year, thanks to our sponsors and audience donations, we were able to raise $15,963 which allowed us to offer payment to our speakers and weekend staff and to provide a cash prize to our hackathon winners and the artists involved with our artist project track.