We’re a Customer Experience (CX) optimisation partner for the music industry

Understand user behaviour

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Minimise drop-offs

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Increase retention and revenue

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Track real-world behavioural trends

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Understand user behaviour ~ Minimise drop-offs ~ Increase retention and revenue ~ Track real-world behavioural trends ~

If 5% of your website’s visitors are converting to paying customers and engaged fans, that means that 95% are dropping off along the way.

With a little help from advanced data science, bespoke machine learning tools, neuropsychological principles, and decades of real-world branding and music industry expertise, Backline works out why.

'32% of all customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience' - PWC, 2025

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'32% of all customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience' - PWC, 2025 ~

  • Customer Experience goes far beyond the products or services you offer; it’s the sum of every interaction a fan has with your brand across digital channels. 

    From the moment they land on your homepage to the way they browse your web store, engage with pre-save campaigns or revisit your newsletter, each touchpoint should build a deeper emotional connection. 

    By implementing deep behavioural analytics from our data processing partner, Amplitude, we track clicks, scrolls, form submissions and heat maps to understand individual journeys at a granular, almost conversational level. We then use this information to build profiles of your core users, including insights into their key behaviours - what they do and don’t like, whether or not they’re returning after their first visit, and what’s stopping them from converting to loyal, paying customers.

    With these insights, you can anticipate consumer needs, serve personalised content in real time, and ensure that every digital exchange feels as caring and intuitive as an in-person encounter - so that fans leave each interaction feeling understood, valued and eager to return.

  • Optimising Customer Experience isn’t just about convenience; it’s the difference between a fleeting visitor and a lifelong superfan. 

    A seamless, personalised journey increases retention, boosts average order value and dramatically reduces churn. By pinpointing friction points with behavioural data - whether it’s abandoned carts, confusing checkout steps or underperforming landing pages - we can swiftly resolve issues before they escalate and make sure that your fans, and customers, keep returning to your web store. 

    Emotion plays a pivotal role in contemporary fandom and consumer loyalty, and positive experiences foster advocacy, inspiring fans to share releases, merch drops and tour announcements organically. In an industry driven by passion and loyalty, a single misstep can cost years of fan goodwill; optimising every interaction safeguards your brand’s reputation and helps you drive sustainable revenue growth.

  • With granular behavioural analytics, you gain clarity on every stage of the fan life cycle. 

    Funnels reveal exactly where fans disengage during pre-save campaigns, streaming redirects or checkout flows. Cohort retention metrics show how newcomers differ from long-term followers and which campaigns create the stickiest relationships. Segmentation uncovers distinct personas - like festival-goers, vinyl collectors, or playlist curators - allowing you to tailor purchase or conversion journeys to each group’s preferences. We can measure feature adoption to see which interactive elements resonate most, predict churn risk to trigger proactive win-back offers, and run A/B tests on everything from email subject lines to landing page layouts. 

    And that’s just the start of it, really. With the right expertise and guidance, these insights can easily translate into data-driven decisions that maximise engagement, consumer retention, organic loyalty, and ROI on your marketing and product spends.

  • We know that insights only matter when they drive action. 

    Our aim is to help you apply analytics to optimise and dynamically personalise your digital storefront: have home pages automatically update to showcase content or merchandise that’s aligned with that user’s past behaviour, or show them product recommendations that are correlated with that user’s streaming or purchase history. Checkout funnels optimised by pre-filling known data and surfacing preferred payment methods, reducing abandonment rates. Post-purchase journeys automatically triggering targeted emails, with cross-sells, exclusive sale or event invites, or thank-you content based on actual behaviour. With the right insights, applied in an intelligent and considered manner, the possibilities are endless and the risks are exceedingly low.

    And crucially, we tie every campaign click back to revenue, enabling precise marketing spend allocation. The result? A high-performing website and web store that feel bespoke to each fan, driving conversion and loyalty, and maximising revenue and ROI across all strands of your digital business.

  • Music fans are driven by emotion, community and exclusivity - factors that digital analytics can quantify and enhance.

    Our team brings front-of-field CX consultancy rooted in real-world music industry experience. We’ve run merch and music e-stores, executed global marketing campaigns, and toured alongside top artists. We know the rhythm of release cycles, and how to leverage behavioural data to map pre-release interest statements into first-day streams and campaign-wide pre-order, purchase, and upsell activity. By integrating ticketing, merch, digital, and streaming data with our best-in-class data analytics and real-world music industry experience, we create unified fan profiles that present unique promotional opportunities for bespoke marketing executions, super fan upgrades, targeted concert offers, and more. 

    And unlike other, more generic firms, Backline’s recommendations are industry-specific, ensuring that every CX strategy we work on together resonates authentically with music audiences and delivers measurable impact.

    The granularity and specificity of our work has led to us having a business-wide understanding of a contemporary music business’s customers and fans, giving us the tools to create an optimisation algorithm for your client or business that can answer the million-dollar question of ‘how do we elevate the quality of our consumers’ experiences while simultaneously driving more conversions?’.

But what is Customer Experience optimisation?

Well, put simply, Customer Experience (CX) is the science of human behaviour. Sure, you might know your fanbase’s core demographics - like where they live, or how old they are - but you don’t really know them, do you?

Understand behavioural patterns

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Guide informed decisions

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Expert data analysis

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A music business-first approach

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Understand behavioural patterns ~ Guide informed decisions ~ Expert data analysis ~ A music business-first approach ~

So, where does Backline come into this?

We all know that the music industry has long sought to understand artists’ fans through the minute analysis of streaming habits, digital behaviour, live experiences, and social media.

We, as consultants, apply the same levels of intimacy and detail to e-commerce.

The core pillars of our offering are the integration of industry-leading platforms for data analysis and real-time insights and the presentation of actionable strategies designed to unlock untapped revenue potential for our clients.

We create a Single Source Of Truth-driven dataset of trackable data trends that gives our clients a multi-faceted and data-driven insight into who their customers are and why they visit their digital platforms. We then combine these trends and data truths with our real-world music industry experience, holistic insights, and best-in-class branding, UX, and aesthetic product optimisation knowledge to give our clients a full-scale insight into their existing users’ behaviours - and help them to make informed decisions accordingly.

In short, Backline helps music brands understand how their customers think.

With our unparalleled understanding of the music industry and top-level data analytics, we provide product optimisation suggestions to boost conversions, build loyalty, and keep customers coming back.

Guided by our founders’ expertise across data science, human psychology and neuroscience, and the music industry itself, we help you make the decisions that transform casual visitors into loyal buyers, and all while making sure that these optimisations are tailored precisely to your brand.

Our background and experience.

We’re a team of neuroscientists, marketers, data scientists, AI experts, and multi-hyphenate creatives who believe that our carefully cultivated combination of creativity and data-driven decision-making has supercharged our product design, growth, and optimisation skills.

With decades of experience working at the heart of the global music and technology industries, our team has developed a fascination with human behaviour and understanding why people make the choices they make, both consciously and subconsciously, within the context of digital products.

'59% of consumers feel companies have lost touch with the human element of customer experience' - PWC, 2025

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'59% of consumers feel companies have lost touch with the human element of customer experience' - PWC, 2025 ~

Case studies

Of course, we all know that the proof is in the pudding. So, here’s an overview of a handful of the things we’ve achieved through our work - both within Backline and as expert in-house staff or contractors - for a handful of key clients within the music, media, and technology sectors.

Increasing consumer retention with push notification optimisation

We were tasked with driving post-event marketing and consumer retention after a major activation point for our client, a digital media company.

After some investigation into their users’ existing behavioural patterns, we started prompting users to opt in to push notifications at the optimal moment in their journey through discovering our client’s product. Here’s how it went:

  • As a result of this activation, an additional 180,000 monthly users opted in to receive push notifications.

  • The total percentage of Monthly Users Opted increased from 17% to 27%.

  • On average, users who have opted in to receive push notifications on their device have a 20-100% increase in sessions per week on this app.

This graph shows the stages of experimentation in the bumps upwards, with opt-ins reaching a peak in the last few months where the rate of optimisation and experimentation accelerated.

Digital app engagement drivers for a major tour

We were tasked with increasing fan engagement on a well-known music-based app platform ahead of a major indie-rock tour.

In the lead-up to the world tour of a major artist, the band’s content was promoted on an app-based digital media platform - and at the point a user engaged with it, they were prompted to fill out a questionnaire to ask if they were attending the tour.

Once the city and date of attendance was collected, users were entered into a month-long countdown to the night they were attending the tour. Via email, push notifications, and In-App Messages, users were served exclusive content, personalised images to share on social media, and a live dynamic image showing the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until the show, as well as a wall calendar asset striking off the nights of the tour as it progressed and daily weather and traffic updates.

In total, there were 11 personalised countdown sends, powered by zero-party data offered by the user. This provided the app with 11 opportunities to promote their and the artist’s content - and more importantly, drive the users back into the platform to browse other content and further attach themselves to both the band as a superfan and the app as an entertainment platform.

These were the flagship campaign results:

  • 28.7% of the campaign’s signed-up users visited the platform 7 days a week, significantly more than the platform’s average Recurring Daily User metric of 16.2%.

  • Signed-up users also showed a 62% increase in retention on the band’s content in the platform.

  • Users who weren’t attending were able to register interest and were prompted with opportunities to win tickets throughout the tour, allowing the app and the band to gather invaluable consumer and marketing data.

Highly qualified data scientists and neuroscientists

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Smart AI insights

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Specialised data-gathering tools

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Music industry-specific insights

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Best-in-class data analysis

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Highly qualified data scientists and neuroscientists ~ Smart AI insights ~ Specialised data-gathering tools ~ Music industry-specific insights ~ Best-in-class data analysis ~

Knowledge hub.

Of course, we’re always happy to share our wisdom.

In fact, we think it’d be rather rude not to. That’s why we lovingly maintain the Backline Knowledge Hub, a one-stop CX and music tech resource that’s packed full of tips, tricks, and insights into all things Customer Experience and music tech. Here are a few recent posts.

On repeat.

At our heart, we’re just a team of music lovers.

And, like all good music lovers, we love nothing more than sharing our favourite tunes with other people. So, we’ve made you a little playlist of everything we’ve been blasting out at Backline HQ over the last few weeks. Because we’re nice like that, really.

'73% of consumers point to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, behind price and product quality' - PWC, 2025

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'73% of consumers point to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, behind price and product quality' - PWC, 2025 ~