WME is headquartered in Beverly Hills, with North American offices in Nashville and New York.

Nielsen Music has announced an agreement with talent agent giant WME centered on Nielsen’s Music Connect service. Nielsen’s industry-leading reporting and analytics tool will empower WME to most effectively promote and position its high-profile roster of clients and enhance the agency’s ability to identify emerging trends and key consumer segments.

The alliance is interesting, in that WME is one of the industry’s largest talent brokerages in the music space, and Nielsen — the 800 pound gorilla in the analytics space — is currently fending off challenges from upstart BuzzAngle. This particular deal, in that it’s with a talent agency, shows the utility of Nielsen’s to different client bases and across different protocols.

As part of the agreement, WME will have access to the complete Music Connect dashboard, including local streaming, sales and airplay data, with the ability to do granular deep dives and explore various data slices. From WME’s perspective, it shows a more proactive approach to getting involved with precision-marketing clients. Interestingly, digital publishing firm Kobalt offers a similar tool, AWAL, geared toward independent, designed to make them more competitive against full-team players. 

“At Nielsen, we’re constantly striving to expand what it means to ‘measure’ and have been working with clients across a wide range of verticals to help them achieve their business goals,” Nielsen Entertainment SVP  and GM Music Erin Crawford said. “We’re excited to work with WME and bring our solutions-focused insights to the agency and its long list of prestigious clients.” Crawford stressed the ability to nimbly navigate the rapidly shifting music landscape is a valuable asset to brands and those who market them. (And these days, the old music business slogan now goes, “I’m with the brand.”)  Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Nielsen has a long-established track record providing consumption tracking for music sales, streaming and the like, and has partnerships in one form or another with most  major labels and industry power players, most notably Billboard, whose charts are powered by Nielsen. While the emergence of digital and streaming music has increased demand for digital analytics services such as those offered by Nielsen, it has also opened the door to some scrappy competitors eager to have a slice of blue-chservices, whose ability to navigate the rapidly shifting music landscape has never been more valuable to brands.

Music Connect  allows clients to mine and manipulate sales, streaming and broadcasting tracking data to produce customized reports about consumer music usage in the market, delivering data quickly, across multiple measurement metrics including streaming, airplay, sales and social media activity for artists, albums and songs all on a responsive and user‐friendly dashboard.

Nielsen, the company that powers the industry-standard Billboard charts, offers capabilities that extend into some of the most critical revenue-driving operations of business. Nielsen’s unique combination of innovative technologies and industry knowledge delivers essential insights to its clients, helping them maximize resources while boosting campaign effectiveness.

In June, Nielsen unveiled its Nielsen Marketing Cloud service with its first client as Westwood One, America’s largest radio network. Westwood One selected Nielsen’s Marketing Cloud advanced data management platform (DMP) to help target its audience using what Nielsen is touting as the the “first-ever audio DMP.” The tool is designed to help advertisers can now make sharper buying decisions across Westwood One’s over-the-air radio and streaming audio channels, which reach almost a quarter of a billion listeners weekly across all U.S. media markets, and helps radio achieve more of a parity with the highly sophisticated targeting tools advertisers use in the mobile and browser space.