Audience Strategies expands the electronic music industry's policy influence with Claude

Audience Strategies partners with the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) to produce the annual "State of Electronic Music" report, which documents the cultural and economic impact of the UK's £2.4 billion electronic music sector.

With Claude, Audience Strategies:

• Compressed their report creation timeline from 3 months to 4 weeks
• Reduced interview preparation and analysis from 2 hours to 25 minutes per interview
• Covered 30% more topics compared to previous reports
• Shortened their writing phase from 4 weeks to just a few days

Breaking through the barriers of manual research

Creating the annual "State of Electronic Music" report—which documents the UK's £2.4 billion electronic music sector for policymakers—required Audience Strategies to process dozens of interviews and hundreds of thousands of words manually. This exhausting approach left the research team too drained to advocate for their findings effectively.

"Our past approach required hundreds of hours of work, making it hard to justify commercially despite the report's importance," said David Boyle, founder of Audience Strategies. "By the end of the report creation process, we lacked the energy for the crucial advocacy phase after publication, limiting its impact."

Selecting Claude for research excellence

After evaluating multiple AI models, Audience Strategies chose Claude for its superior ability to handle complex research tasks. Boyle said, "Claude feels smarter in ways that matter to our work—researching, thinking, making decisions, and understanding the world. "With Claude, I rarely need to explain anything. It just works.”

The decision came down to three factors:

• Extensive context window: Claude allowed the team to process entire interview transcripts without artificial constraints. "We can input vastly more information—more interview transcripts, strategy documents, and research pieces," Boyle noted.
• Claude Projects: Shareable projects with live-linked knowledge files to the latest version of Google Docs enabled seamless collaboration across their distributed team.
• Natural writing style: The output quality felt genuinely human rather than artificially structured.

How Claude powers comprehensive industry analysis

Audience Strategies integrated Claude into their research and writing workflow, transforming how they create the annual electronic music report.

For interview processing, the team uploads transcripts from otter.ai to dedicated Claude projects, then through a series of prompts Claude:

• Generates high-level summaries of key takeaways
• Categorizes insights according to report sections (economic impact, cultural significance, policy challenges)
• Extracts powerful quotes that capture unique perspectives
• Identifies emergent themes across multiple interviews

"Claude helped us uncover a previously unexplored therapeutic dimension of electronic music," Boyle shared. By connecting comments about neurodiverse communities gravitating toward electronic music with discussions about sound system experiences, Claude uncovered insights that led to new research initiatives exploring how specific BPM ranges may create uniquely supportive environments for neurodiverse individuals.

The team maintains their "CEO method"—Check, Edit, and Own every piece of AI-generated content. Boyle emphasized, "We stand by everything in the report. If there's a mistake, that's on us, not on AI."

For collaboration, Claude Projects improved how the five-person team works across the UK and Australia. Claude allows team members to access shared knowledge bases, with all source materials live-linked from Google Docs. This eliminates version control issues and ensures everyone works from the same dataset.

Amplifying impact across the electronic music ecosystem

The Claude-enhanced report has achieved unprecedented policy influence. The current edition has been directly cited in three local authority nightlife strategy documents and referenced in parliamentary discussions on cultural spaces—a level of governmental engagement the team had never seen before.

This impact stems from the report's expanded scope and diversity. "We interviewed about 25 people, and extracting the right insights from all those transcripts simply wasn't possible without Claude," explained Rufy Ghazi, Music Research Lead at Audience Strategies and a DJ with a decade of industry experience. Claude's ability to process and synthesize hundreds of thousands of words enabled the team to include more diverse voices than ever, particularly from underrepresented communities and emerging scenes.

Michael Kill, CEO of the NTIA, notes that this broader representation gives the report additional credibility with policymakers. "The report now truly represents the full spectrum of the electronic music ecosystem," he said, making it a more powerful tool for advocacy.

Beyond creating a better report, Claude has transformed the team's capacity for sustained impact. "The 2025 project wouldn't have been completed without Claude, given our late start and compressed timeline," Boyle confirmed. But more importantly, the team now finishes with energy to spare. "We're now much more effective advocates for the report and its findings," Boyle explained. "We have the capacity to engage with policymakers, speak at industry events, and work directly with stakeholders to implement recommendations."

Building the future of cultural documentation

Audience Strategies envisions a future where AI democratizes high-quality research and storytelling across underrepresented sectors and communities. Boyle explained, "Industries and communities that historically lacked resources for professional research can now tell their stories with unprecedented depth and authority."

As Claude's capabilities evolve, the team anticipates even more sophisticated applications. They look forward to incorporating historical material from previous report editions for longitudinal analysis of how the industry evolves over time. They also expect Claude to help identify gaps in their research proactively, suggesting missing perspectives based on its understanding of the electronic music ecosystem.

"This approach represents the future of industry research and cultural documentation—not replacing human expertise but amplifying it to create more inclusive, insightful, and impactful storytelling," Boyle concluded. For the UK electronic music industry—and countless other cultural sectors waiting to tell their stories—this AI-enhanced approach to research and documentation offers a powerful new voice in shaping public understanding and policy.