Tired of gambling on artists and watching your promotional budget vanish into thin air? Are you ready to ditch the guesswork and start filling venues with eager fans? This guide unveils the five critical "hidden signals" that can help you predict an artist's success before you start spending on marketing.

Key Metrics:

• Followers
• Monthly Listeners
• Top 5 cities

If your artist releases music on Spotify, you can head to their artist profile page on the desktop/browser version of Spotify and scroll to the bottom where you’ll find their About section. Click on the thumbnail and a popup should open where you can see the three metrics that will give you a strong sense of where their music is popular. Although this doesn’t give you much detail, since Spotify is such a widely used platform, you can trust these stats will be a strong signal for whether the artist has a fanbase in your city. Unfortunately, if your city doesn’t feature in the top five this can seem unhelpful, but consider the similarities of your market and the markets featured in the top 5. You may uncover a strong parallel which gives you greater confidence in your booking decisions.

Before we go any further, it’s worth pointing out that followers and listeners don’t always convert to ticket buyers. If, for example, your artist is featured on successful tracks led by other artists, the metrics can be inflated by the popularity of the other artists on those tracks.

Key Metrics:

• Followers
• Engagement Rate calculator
  • <1% not good
  • <3% ok
  • 3% good
  • 5% great

Looking at an artist’s number of followers can help but is only useful when combined with their engagement rate. The engagement rate is the percentage of their followers that engage (like, comment, etc.). You can calculate the engagement rate easily using an online tool like this. Engagement is an indication of how interested their audience is, and you can use this as a signal for how likely their followers are to buy tickets.

Having said that, sometimes an artist’s following/engagement is inflated for other reasons. If your artist is a particularly effective influencer (they post content that naturally performs well on the algorithm), this may not mean all their fans want to see them live - they might just like the content.