BandLab shapes the future of music through data and experimentation

Insight/Action/Outcome: BandLab’s product management team turned to Amplitude Experiment to improve its cloud-based, digital audio workstation, where artists can create and share music online. Together with Amplitude Analytics, BandLab discovered areas of improvement and features that enhanced customer experience and segmented its global user base to create more effective marketing campaigns in emerging markets like Brazil, India, and the Philippines.

What does it take for an aspiring musician to succeed in the music industry today?—that’s the question we’re trying to answer at BandLab. Our digital audio workstation (DAW) is a creator-first destination that offers a variety of tools that artists need to create, mix, and collaborate on music projects from start to finish, completely free. We also go beyond to help them get their songs onto streaming platforms or introduce them to opportunities like performance gigs and mentorships.

Our mission is to shape the future of music by building tools for a new generation of creators and fans. To this day, we have more than 100 million registered users and plenty of them are in the top charts in music streaming services like Spotify—that’s exciting for us to see!

As a product manager, I want to keep users happy with BandLab—so making the right decisions based on data is a top priority. That’s why I live and breathe Amplitude, and help other product managers do the same.

Connecting dots to discover the bigger picture

My biggest challenge is basically knowing the unknown—the “what” and “why” of any given situation. Unfortunately, our previous analytics program had limited detail for each event and querying was inflexible, which made it difficult to make sense of the results from our A/B tests and other anomalies. When we faced unexpected results, our previous vendor couldn’t provide the support or troubleshooting we needed, making us lose trust in our data. Our primary concern was getting the answers we needed, and not being able to find them was frustrating—that’s why we turned to Amplitude Experiment and Analytics.

With Experiment backed up by Analytics, we can do a deep dive into any workflow or parameter affected by our experimental changes. Having this level of detail with such a powerful, intuitive interface allows us to freely understand our product performance and customer behavior. This is what led us to choose Amplitude. With our previous platform, Firebase, we were tracking any kind of data just because we could. In the end, we didn’t know what steps to take next—there was no focus on what we wanted to look at. Now, we’re getting the numbers that matter, optimizing our time and cost. So even when something seems off, we know it’s worth investigating—and that can pay off in meaningful improvements.

What we’re trying to achieve with data and analytics is not the one huge change that drastically impacts our bottom line but rather the small incremental changes that make the BandLab experience better every day for our users. Having such detailed insights at our fingertips is really refreshing, as it continuously pushes us to take the right step in the right direction.

Tuning into customers’ needs

Having Analytics also fits into our bigger picture of understanding what our users want. As we started to focus on driving our subscription service, we wanted to work out which was the most effective user pathway. We used Analytics funnel analysis to see how we could optimize certain features like payment methods, and then observe which change had the best effect.

We have also integrated Amplitude with our customer engagement platform Braze to shed more light on customers’ preferences. Our marketing team imports data cohorts—a set of behavioral analytics—allowing them to pinpoint who they want to target, and report back to Amplitude with results of who clicked through on a link, who didn't, and which campaigns performed well. They can also then use this information within Amplitude to get even more insights on these users, which enables them to spend more time taking action on things that work, and less time figuring out why things don't.

One of our biggest wins is that our marketing team was able to segment our global user base more effectively. When we first started with Amplitude, most of our users were based in the US. As we continued using the platform, our team created specific user cohorts and sent them to Braze for targeted marketing campaigns. This has been particularly impactful in emerging markets like Brazil, India, and the Philippines, aligning with our vision of having no boundaries for creators to make and share music.

Cultivating an experiment-driven culture

Having Amplitude has changed how we approach data. It’s something concrete that we can use to define success. Decisions are much easier to make, and they’re not just based on how we feel but on the data we’re getting. Now, we are simultaneously running 30 experiments across different teams—6X more than ever before. We would be moving at a much slower pace without getting the kind of reliable data we do from Amplitude.

We’re also more efficient at transferring and using data. One of the things that the integration with Braze has improved is the ease of event forwarding—the distribution of information received about users or product use—to Analytics. Instead of having to manually forward events, we can perform that quickly via Analytics. We also get alerts when something risky is happening, like forwarding too many events at once, so we’re able to monitor the overall process better and keep our activities under control.

Our team couldn’t have achieved this level of success without the support of Amplitude, especially from Senior Customer Success Manager Steffie Marshalina Halim and Sales Lead Madhuri Krishnan. They were always willing to answer our nitty-gritty questions and connect us with the right people to make sure we were getting the help we needed!

Shaping the future with data

What’s next for us is to see through our customers’ eyes better—that’s why we hope to explore the session replay feature, which will provide better visualization of what users are going through. It’ll help us zone in on any problems and dig deeper into why and where those are happening.

We are also planning to use artificial intelligence (AI) to give customers the best recommendations for the goals they want to achieve. That kind of tailored experience could be the biggest change coming to BandLab in the next few years. At the same time, we want to make sure we continue to protect human creativity in the age of generative AI. As our CEO and Co-Founder Meng Ru Kuok says, “As we develop new tools, we must remember that technology is at its best when it enhances, not overshadows, human creativity.”

The key lesson I’ve learned from using Amplitude is how to think about data better—even though I don’t come from a data background, I feel I’ve gained a lot of experience in thinking about data and how to use it more sustainably and cost-effectively. It’s shaped my knowledge of how data works and how I can get the best out of it.