With the revolution that Internet has brought, we have access to huge amounts of information to decide which artist is the most suitable for our event. But how can we use the information provided by social networks and streaming music platforms for our artistic contracts as promoters?

In the past, experience was necessary to know the repercussion on ticket sales that an artist could have. Nowadays, artists leave a much more faithful trace of their magnitude, since their music is measured by plays/views that are available to all of us, as well as followers on social networks. Not only that, but we can observe the behavior of the followers with their artists.

The main streaming and social media platforms are: Youtube, Spotify, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

What do you need to know about the data you pull out from music platforms?

In addition to the total volumes, it is very important to take into account the growth, since if we make a contract for 6 months from now, the growth the artist has had in this time will be a direct benefit for our event.

A way to measure this is basing ourselves on a single very simple norm: the artist who is growing is more likely to continue growing than the artist who is more static.

It is important to note that growth is almost always going to be positive, since YouTube views accumulate, and followers do not worry about stopping following an artist, as it is very rare to see decreasing graphs of these two indicators. And if there is… Watch out!

To all this there is an exception: Spotify listeners. This indicator is very important; since it does show decrease in the graphs because few listeners worry about unfollowing an artist if they no longer have such importance in the life of a listener, but they do stop listening to their music.

To understand the previous paragraph it is important to understand what a listener is: a listener is a person who has listened to an artist at least 1 time in the last 28 days.

This graphic is very important, for what we mentioned in the previous paragraph and related to the promotional campaigns that the record companies make of the artists. An artist may seem to be booming because everyone listens to them during a period…

Of course, this is not difficult with millions in marketing behind. But the question is: Who maintains his fame after the promotion? How many listeners really find value in an artist without a 24/7 advertising blitz?

So, putting a little order to all these ideas…

what aspects should we consider of an artist regarding his digital presence?

• Total subscribers and views of an artist’s YouTube channel: pay attention to views that it may have outside its channel!
• Total monthly artist followers and listeners on Spotify.
• Artist Growth: An artist who is growing a lot is more likely to be more profitable. This data cannot be obtained for free, but at Drop.Show we offer Big Data services that you can try for free.
• Total followers of the artist on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Keep in mind that artists with a young audience will have more representation on Instagram and Twitter, while veteran audiences will be more located on Facebook. I personally dismiss Twitter quite a bit.
• Other very important additional information to contrast: Spotify popularity (it is an internal indicator of the streaming platform that compares the artist with the rest of the world) and the artist engage with his followers (number of interactions of the artist on its social networks).

We have focused on the projection and growth of artists, but this does not ensure that a certain number of tickets will be sold in your area.

You will have to know the location of your artist´s listeners and followers. You can consult this post on how to use the location of the listeners and followers of the artists to hire those that your city wants to hear.

We cannot forget that everything collected in this post is more useful the more digital representation the artist has. That is to say: Guns N ‘Roses has the same listeners on Spotify as Rosalía, but they sell approximately 13 times more tickets than the Catalan artist because they are legends.

For this reason, this way of evaluating artists is useful, but we must look with specific glasses at each one of them so as not to slip up. The more recent the growth of an artist and the more targeted to a young audience that uses social media and listens to music on the internet, the more useful this data will be.