Every day, programmers at major streaming services, marketing professionals looking for artist alignment, and A&R leads trying to sign the next big star are confronted with hundreds of thousands of artists trying to grab their attention. Most likely, they already have a couple of techniques and tools for weeding out the duds, but each source can be its own beast, with overwhelming amounts of data to sort through and little framework for contextualizing it. And of course, the music industry is changing so rapidly that an artist can easily lose momentum as quickly as they gained it. Buzz is ephemeral, and while instincts are important, they can't fill in every blank.
That’s where music intelligence comes in. It's an approach that leverages an analytics system that pinpoints the most important morsels of data, and pairs them with human insights from writers and journalists who have wide-ranging expertise in specialized genres, scenes, and territories. With a combination of quantitative data and qualitative knowledge, it’s possible to identify artists who are only just breaking out.
Understanding the data
A glance at one of Third Bridge Creative's intelligence tools reveals a wealth of information to make informed decisions about artists who warrant attention. The bar graph at the top presents a first snapshot. The bars themselves share the numbers of artists who are enjoying some level of growth and sorts them by career stage (undiscovered, mid-level, or developing); clicking a colored section of any of the bars filters the results below to display only those who meet that qualification. This classification system—devised by TBC's collaborators at Chartmetric—captures how quickly an artist is reaching broader recognition. In addition, TBC's algorithmically driven Artist Score aggregates various metrics and reflects the overall relevancy of an artist for any particular project, tightening the focus on the artists that matter most.
The playlisting, short-form video, and charting scores help explain why a given artist is gaining momentum. The playlisting score looks at numerous trendsetter and emerging artists playlists, capturing those who make noteworthy appearances. The short-form video score indicates an artist’s prominence on TikTok or YouTube Shorts, while the charting score reflects their presence in trending charts on major DSPs.
The list of artists now consists only of potential trendsetters who are undiscovered or developing and have some form of trending growth. Adding the TBC Score makes it clear that these artists deserve attention. With the data sorted, it’s time to look a little closer.
Expertise pays off
This type of tooling and data-sorting is invaluable for programmers and curators, and can help them quickly focus on a small pool of viable candidates for their campaigns, playlists, or stations. But it still requires the intuition and research of a trained analyst to understand how to interpret the information and make key decisions.
In a recent example, the artist known as Maeta had a high TBC Artist Score and a decent Cross Platform Performance (CPP) Velocity of around 50%. The sultry R&B singer has worked with stars like SZA, Ty Dolla $ign, and Kehlani, and she had put out a new album not long before, which might explain her high ranking. She had also appeared on a recent New Music Friday update on Spotify, as well as on 23 other editorial playlists. But despite what appeared to be a consistent DSP push, Maeta had a low count of TikTok Track Posts and didn't appear to be making a big splash on the platform. While her music is smooth and has a tight mainstream sound, it seemed wise to wait a few more weeks after the new-release buzz to see where she stands on this list.
Elsewhere in the data there appeared a few names familiar from TBC’s own Sound Signal newsletter: That Mexican OT and 6arelyhuman. Existing in niche subgenres of Texas trap music and '00s nostalgic hyperpop, respectively, these two trending artists were flagged by experts with knowledge in the scenes where they were gaining traction. TBC had been following That Mexican OT since last year—at the time, he only had modest hits on Spotify, but he was clearly unique, with his Spanish-language bars drawing more from U.S. classic rap than reggaetón. That alchemy paid off: The runaway hit “Johnny Dang” brought him up to a TBC Artist Score of 79 in spring 2023, and he also saw a huge increase in TikTok and Instagram followers. Likewise, the gloomy club music of 6arelyhuman, who was highlighted in a Sound Signal post in early May, has continued to resonate with listeners, with a TBC Artist Score of 75, explosive growth, and more than 100,000 TikTok Track Posts.
The process of identifying emerging artists will never be simple, given the multitude of evolving factors in artist popularity and listener attention span. No single artist is going to have the highest streaming numbers, social stats, and viral short-form video posts all at the same time. But with a combination of clear, stratified data and informed, focused human skill sets, it's entirely possible to pinpoint an artist with a real spark, who has the potential to succeed in whatever niche genre they belong to.
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