30 Artists To Watch (according to Cymbal users)
by Gabe Jacobs
Cymbal attracts a unique breed. It’s an app built for music nerds. Each day these people think deeply about what song they want to share with the world. For most, that’s not part of the daily routine. However for Cymbal people, it comes naturally. This is the the type of person who in college would stay up until 2 AM on Wednesdays because that was the only open slot at the radio station. It’s the type of person who makes a hat that says “Make Last.Fm Great Again” (thank you @amdrexler). These wonderful people live and breathe music. When you put all of them into one room, like Cymbal does, great things start to happen.
The point is, our users seem to have a particularly good ear for recognizing songs and artists that are primed to break out. I know from personal experience. Time after time I see artists on Cymbal begin to gain traction, only later to find they are all over the internet. I’m sure Cymbal isn’t the only place this is happening. There are wonderful curators on Reddit, Spotify, and Apple Music, but I believe the environment that exists on Cymbal raises curation to a new level. It beckons for deeper cuts and stronger foresight. I have hypotheses about why this might be, but I will save that for a future blog post. For now, I will simply say that over the course of the two years we’ve worked on Cymbal, I’ve seen artists “brew” so to speak. I’ve seen them gain traction and grow into the mainstream.
When a certain number of people on the app begin to share an artist, it becomes apparent that they are on the verge of trending. You can visibly see the hints. The best example that comes to mind is the band Whitney. Take a look at this graph which displays the rate at which Whitney was shared on Cymbal over the course of 6 months (I had to hide the left axis to protect our scale, but the important part is the trend line).
The graph starts in January 2016 which is when “No Woman” was released. At this time, Whitney was quite small. This was their only song on Spotify and it wasn’t until March 2016, at SXSW, that many started to pick up on the talent of the band. Finally the band explodes in June when their album is released and they receive write-ups from various publications. What’s interesting here is the relatively steady line that you can see before the explosion. Even though not much new music was being released, the rate of posts stayed constant. That is, each week, people consistently told us one of Whitney’s songs was their “song of the moment.” Keep in mind, this graph does not include the same person posting Whitney more than once, so this means that each day someone new found Whitney and decided they loved it. When you notice trend lines like these on Cymbal, something important is happening.
As much as I wish this article was an in depth look into Cymbal’s data, it’s not. That will hopefully come soon, after much more research (and maybe some help from a data scientist). For now, we’re going to focus on one thing. If Cymbal’s curators are especially talented at finding great new music before the world does, what artists now do they predict have the greatest chance of being discovered in 2017 and beyond.
Here’s how I came up with the list. First, I polled the community. I could have spent hours looking at the post frequency of every artist in our database, but as a shortcut, I went straight to the source. I asked them what artists they believe are unknown now, but won’t be in the future. The response was fantastic and I was blown away by the quality of music suggested by the community. Once I had a solid list of artists, I took a look at their post frequency on Cymbal. If I saw a relatively steady rate of posts, I kept them on the list. If their rate of posts had a long drought or was at zero, I took them off the list. I also took them off the list if I believed they had already blown up. Everyone has a different definition of what has “blown up,” but mine is pretty strict. This list is for artists that seem unknown to most people, so if they had multiple songs with millions of plays on Spotify, I also took them off.
Soon I will be looking at Cymbal’s data more closely to try to find a stronger pattern in figuring out the success of an artist. Everything from sentiment analysis of comments to average like frequency should be considered. But without further adieu, here are 30 artists you should keep an eye on, thanks to the help of the Cymbal community. The list is ordered by artists that had graphs most similar to Whitney’s graph, before they blew up. Keep in mind that Cymbal users (especially the ones that follow me) are into a certain kind of music, so this list might not be for you (sorry EDM people). Other information, like when their last single was released, was also considered when making the list.
A special thanks to these Cymbal users for contributing:
@juliusbilly, @samanthasacks, @madamepsychosis, @moontides, @thesquidandthewoods, @Dunn22, @lizzylu222, @Lloyd, @asequii, @elenas, @buddyatmarina, @amdrexler, @leash, @yaszee, @hjeb32, @B1AKEE, @nadams, @cculley121, @StapleBuffalo, @ZiggyShoegazer, @grcae, @jtmiles, @bear, @Insert_Flame_Emjoi, @MattyMo, @joga, @ejaynes, @rhomcy, @missmissy
