Written by Julien Benatar, Shannon Hughes & Anabelle Zee.

It has never been easier for artists to access data. In this day and age, any interaction between an artist and their fans can be counted. New fans, new plays, retweets, thumbs up. Any engagement can now be measured and is accessible at our fingertips.

Having all this data is great, but it can easily get to be more overwhelming than it is useful. Despite all the data available, we still get two main questions from artists and their teams when they first look at their dashboards: “What does this number actually mean?” and “Is it any good?”.

And these are important questions. Artists may have access to all the numbers in the world, but without the right context, it can be challenging to make sense of it all. Seeing that you have more mentions or thumbs from the previous week is interesting, but you’re only looking at yourself. The limitation here is the lack of context. What do these numbers actually indicate for an artist at that stage in their career? How can we turn these numbers into compelling stories?

It’s all about expectations

Today we’re really excited to introduce you to our most advanced artist insight to date: Weekly Performance.

Weekly Performance gives an artist context around their engagement metrics. It illustrates how an artist is performing on different platforms compared to all other artists with similarly-sized audiences on each of those platforms. It currently includes Pandora, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

After introducing the science at SXSW, we’re super excited to release it to everyone today. You can now access these new Weekly Performance metrics by visiting any artist profile on Next Big Sound.

Let’s look at an example

Kero Kero Bonito is a U.K. band. Back in February, we were looking at their engagement metrics, and one stuck out in particular. They saw 146 Twitter mentions, which was down 76% compared to the previous week.

This is a very standard way to visualize data. One value represents the engagement for that week, and the percent change shows the comparison between that week and the previous one. By looking at just this, things didn’t look too good for our band. They were down 76%.

Percent change can be useful, in some cases. But there are two limitations to keep in mind:

You’re only looking at yourself. There’s no benchmark, no context. Percent change cannot always be positive. Even Beyoncé had seen a decline in Twitter mentions the week after she released Lemonade. Why? The post that announced Lemonade saw so much engagement, that any post afterwards paled in comparison.

So while a red down arrow on a dashboard may feel pretty negative, it doesn’t necessarily need to be. And the only way to know is to look at this number in context of other artists in the music industry.

The science behind the curtain

To add context to Kero Kero Bonito’s numbers, we have to dive into the science behind Weekly Performance.

Our superstar data scientist Shannon Hughes explains it to us, with visuals by our designer Anabelle Zee.

To get an idea how unusual BTS’s engagement of 61M Twitter mentions for 13M followers is, we note that the second highest number of Twitter mentions for a band with a similar following size to BTS (12–14 million followers) was just 300,000 Twitter mentions. BTS outperformed the artist with the next highest engagement by a factor of 200! That shows just how passionate K-pop fans are.

BTS’s engagement level is so unusual that it is way outside the normal range of behavior. If we moved the upper red line of our model up to include BTS, we’d extend everyone else’s expected range, just to fit one extremely unusual band inside the model, and it would look like every other artist in the world is failing to perform well on Twitter. Drake included.

As soon as we stopped looking at a number on its own, the story becomes much different. It actually tells us the opposite. At first we thought Kero Kero Bonito might not have been doing well, seeing their 76% decrease from the previous week. But in the context of looking at other artists with 26K Twitter Followers, we see that their fans are much more engaged than what is typically expected. Kero Kero Bonito is doing exactly what they should be doing to engage with their fans.

Weekly Performance for Kero Kero Bonito’s Twitter Mentions in February (by Cynthia Meng)

At Next Big Sound, we strongly believe that numbers can only start to make sense given the right context. Weekly Performance now allows us to help artists look at their numbers in context of artists with similarly-sized audiences. You don’t have to look at your numbers in silo anymore.

This is just the beginning

Helping artists and their teams make sense of their data is our priority, and we can’t wait to introduce you to more features to do so.

Not a user yet? Signing up is free and only takes a few seconds. If you or an artist you work with isn’t already on Next Big Sound, adding a profile is a few clicks away.

Questions? Let’s chat! E-mail us at support@nextbigsound.com if you need help navigating Weekly Performance.