NYU Data Analysis In the Music Industry Class Recap

I just submitted the final grades for the 24 grad students of Data Analysis in the Music Industry:  Strategy and Application MPAMB-GE.2211. With that, and a quick shave of my beard, my first semester as an adjunct professor comes to a close!

I had two main objectives in the course for the students:

1. Basic proficiency in collecting, cleaning, and conducting data analysis.
2. An understanding of how data is currently being used (or could be used) across the music industry to make smarter business decisions.

The first half of the course was heavy on data problem sets, APIs, building algorithms, and technical speakers and lessons. The second half of the course was much more about guest speakers from across the industry and how they use, misuse, or don’t use data in their role.  

I used two texts in the course to support these objective: Data Science for Business: Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett and The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver.

Each class would have a title (Class II was Messy, Messy Data), a series of questions for the class, takeaway points I wanted the class to walk away with, and homework that supported the lesson.

There were six homework assignments, three quizzes, and a large take home group research final and presentation. My weekends were spent grading homework and quizzes and preparing for the 2 hour Monday evening class. Glad to be on summer break and back to just my full time job at Pandora!

We had speakers from Sony ATV, Warner/Atlantic, Ticketmaster, Paradigm, Edison Research, Youtube, Instagram, Crush and mTheory, Buzz Angle and many more. The class also took a fun field trip at the end of the semester to Pandora’s NYC offices across from Grand Central and was definitely a highlight. Thanks to all the speakers that came and gave generously of their time and knowledge.

One final thank you to the Pandora leadership team for allowing me to take this on -- we are all excited to see what the students go on to achieve throughout the music industry this summer and after graduation!