Make Less Risky Decisions with Genre Insights

Urska Jaksa

Sep 16, 2020

We've customized these instructions for label executives, A&Rs, and other music pros. If you're looking for a guide specifically for artists and their teams, check out this one.

Here’s what you can do with the Genre analytics:

📍 Identify the countries with the most event and festival activity in the genre.

🔝 Find the fastest-rising artists, have an overview of their online performance, and learn from their strategies.

💪 Determine the strongest social media and streaming channels that you should focus on, see how fast they’re growing and how engaged fans are.

🎪 Research the top festivals, and start working on small steps that can help artists on your roster get towards the end goal.

To get started, go to the search box in the navigation bar and type in the genre you want to explore. When you get to the specific Genre Page, click the "ANALYTICS" button. If you haven't selected your plan yet, you'll first have to sign up and choose the right option for you. 

Even before that, here’s a guide that will help you get the best of it. We used Electronic music as an example, but you can check the analytics of genres across the board – from Hip Hop to Classical and everything in between.

And now off to the sections…

#1 Genre Overview

This is the overall number of artists and festivals of a specific genre according to our database.

❓ HOW TO USE IT: 

See how big the market is worldwide. Check other genres and compare them to get a feeling for their popularity. 

#2 Top Countries by Live Performances

Explore the top countries(and the top cities) sorted by the number of events and festivals in the genre and their capacity. 

❓ HOW TO USE IT: 

Identify potential markets to include in your promotion strategies. Countries also have their own analytics pages where you can explore them further. This article will help you with your research:

📌 Do All Your Country Research in One Place

#3 Fastest Rising Artists

See the top artists on the rise, sorted by their Viberate Popularity growth in the last 30 days. Below, you'll also find a longer list of rising artists, sorted by their Viberate rank. Wondering what Viberate Popularity is? It’s a metric, calculated based on the overall data from social media and music channels.

❓ HOW TO USE IT:

Get a quick overview of the artists with the potential for blowing up in the Fastest Rising Artists section. Dig deeper and identify the reasons behind their growth to get valuable ideas when planning promotion campaigns for artists on your roster. 

Going further to the Rising Artists list: if you’re looking for emerging artists to book or add to your roster, this is your shortest-cut. Scroll through and dig deeper by clicking on each artist – this takes you to their Page. This will help you do your research:

📌 Learn About the Artists Through Their Stats

See where certain artists excel by checking and comparing their Career Health. For example, if every indicator is green, this is most probably a superstar act. Breakthrough artists usually have music channel performance in the green, with the other two indicators lagging, while social media stars are winning on social media but lack in music channel performance. Read more here:

📌 What's Career Health, Anyway?

Another way to explore emerging artists is by using Charts and applying the appropriate filters. Here’s a detailed guide.

#4 Top Subgenres

You’ll get an overview of the most popular subgenres, calculated based on the top 3,000 artists in the genre.

❓ HOW TO USE IT: 

Assess the market potential of subgenres on different channels by comparing their fanbases and engagement across the channels. In the graph above, Electronic subgenres are sorted by Viberate Popularity, but you can also customize the sorting by the number of Spotify followers, SoundCloud plays, etc.

#5 Genre Fanbase Growth and Engagement Overview

These two sections are similar as they respectively show fanbase growth and engagement for the top 3,000 artists in the genre across different channels in different timelines.

❓ HOW TO USE IT:

When planning a release, gig, tour or any kind of promotional activity, determine the stronger channels to focus your efforts on.

Use different timelines to see if and how the fans' attention shifts from channel to channel. The relevance of social media and music channels varies through time.

This is how the fanbase of Electronic artists grows per day on average. Below you see how the total fanbase increased in the last month across channels (you can see that the Spotify, YouTube, and Instragram fanbases grew the most).

#6 Top Artists by Fanbase Growth and Engagement

Here you also find the artists with the highest number of new followers and the biggest engagement on each channel in the previous month.

❓ HOW TO USE IT: 

See who’s dominating each channel and check their Pages to study the strategies that the teams behind the artists use.

In the example below, you see which Electronic artists had the biggest fanbase increase in August.

#7 Most Mentioned Artists in the Previous Month

This is an overview of the top 50 artists who received the most Instagram and Twitter mentions from other artists in the previous month.

❓ HOW TO USE IT: 

You’ll find the artists who've generated the most interest in the industry. These will mostly be superstar acts, but some may also be rising stars that you could potentially book, sign, or manage.

#8 Most Connected Artists

You’ll find artists with the highest number of other artists following them on Instagram, Twitter, and SoundCloud.

❓ HOW TO USE IT: 

Here, you’ll find the most-connected artists in the industry, but if you go through the full list from time to time, you might find a hidden gem you could potentially book, sign, or manage. You can sort the list by different channels. Clicking on a specific artist will take you to their Page, where you can explore their network in detail.

#9 Top Festivals and Most Mentioned Festivals by Artists

These two sections show the festivals with the strongest lineups and the festivals with the most artists’ mentions in the previous month.

❓ HOW TO USE IT:

Use this as a vision board. To elevate the career of the artists on your roster, start by finding smaller festivals, where they'll gain experience and connections, and gradually move to the bigger festivals. You can start by filtering festivals on Viberate.com by genre, subgenre, country, etc.

Check the festivals that are currently popular on social media. Do a background check to see which could be the right ones for the artists on your roster next year.

Read this next:

Learn About the Artists Through Their Stats

Do All Your Country Research in One Place

Find Emerging Artists with Charts