Speaking of music services, Billboard’s Melinda Newman reports on today’s beta launch of Apple Music For Artists, a dashboard to provide artists with hundreds of data points about their fans’ listening habits.

The initial beta rollout involves a few thousand artists who will test the product and see what adjustments and expansions, if any, should be made before Apple Music for Artists opens in the Spring to the several million artists with content on the iTunes and Apple Music platforms. Later plans call for a mobile app.

The easily navigable dashboard’s home page provides artists with their current number of plays, spins, song purchases and album purchases. The user can specify the time period ranging from the past 24 hours to the 2015 launch of Apple Music.

Other services have offered similar analytics products for years, but Billboard notes that Apple’s take features more depth and a cleaner user interface for artists.

In addition to broad strokes, artists can drill down on a granular level in myriad ways. A global map allows musicians to click on any of the 115 countries in which Apple Music/iTunes is available and find out what’s happening with their music. They can select individual cities and see how many plays and sales they have in each market, as well as look at their top songs in every city. They may further examine the listener demographics per city, for example, calling up how many times females ages 16-24 in Los Angeles have listened to a particular song.
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Additionally, artists can view all Apple-curated playlists on which they appear, see how many plays they receive and how they are trending over time.

If you’re an artist offering content on Apple Music, this sounds like a pretty cool addition to the service, especially because you can inspect data going back to Apple Music’s launch over two years ago.