The thing with puzzles is that you can’t just grab pieces from the pile and start putting them together, and a single puzzle piece in isolation won’t show you the whole picture. Similarly, without a data strategy, it’s hard to see the complete picture and how each piece can be leveraged effectively as part of the whole.

In the music industry, we are creating data faster than ever before. It’s well known that the data is often incomplete and inconsistent, or riddled with typos and duplications, leading to inefficiencies and inaccurate analysis. I often hear talk about data cleaning, but a point of failure arises when data cleaning initiatives aren’t approached with a corresponding strategy for ongoing input of high-quality inbound data as well.