Who’s your favorite rap artist? Drake? Weeknd? Lil Yachty? Etc..? Have you ever wondered how much it would cost you to have them come play at your next birthday party, wedding, etc…? I found myself in a similar situation a few weeks ago planning a private event for my company, Volume. We were hosting an event for the winning student organization on the University of Illinois campus that won our competition.

The winning organization would get a a private event thrown in their name with a famous artist playing. We had to hire an artist for the event so I started reaching out to some various booking agencies and independent artists to get some quotes. Along the way, a good friend and team member Tahj referred me to a website where we could see how much artists charge for a private event. Those numbers can be viewed here.

Serendipitously, a few artist friends of mine were contacting me around the same time, asking me for financial advice on how much to charge for a show. They figured since I had experience in market research and finance that I could help them out. Originally, I dismissed them and told them unfortunately, I didn’t have the right experience to offer them help. A few days passed and while analyzing artists on twitter with another friend of mine, we came to the realization, “Can we model a correlation between twitter followers and the amount an artist charges?”

Obviously, there’s got to be some correlation, the more famous you are, the more you’re going to charge. But I wanted to take it a step further: I started to collect my data using the Twitter SDK and the website above to get my raw data. Here’s what it looked like in raw data:

First 36 artists analyzed.

I collected 246 data points, which I thought was a suitable enough sample size.

The entire list can be viewed and downloaded here. The data is open source, have at it.

The Results

The Confidence Interval for the charge was ~$6250, with 95% confidence. The Confidence Interval for the Twitter followers was ~570,000 followers, with 95% confidence. Now that we got those out of the way, let’s talk about correlation between the two data sets and some interesting stuff I found.

Basic Stat Results

In the end, I found a correlation between the data sets, albeit a small one, but one none-the-less. Now, I know about 80% of you are going to give me the STAT 101 cliche that “correlation doesn’t imply causation.” But I think we can all agree there is some causation here: More followers = I can charge more. However, that wasn’t really the case with some artists, including The Weeknd.

The Weeknd. $500,000 with 4,210,000 followers.

The Weeknd was the staple definition of an outlier, you’ll see him on this distant point below on the scatter plot as a lonely little island that possibly may have some correlation to his music. Maybe that’s for the next article?

Artists with 4–5 million followers

After looking at Artists both you had the same amount of following base (4,000,000–5,000,000 followers) he should be charging around $56,000. That’s what the average booking cost was for the other 5 counterparts with followers 4,000,000–5,000,000 followers. That means The Weeknd is charging 9x more than his Twitter value. That, however, is only a slice of a big that we can analyze. Let’s take a look at the scatter plot:

Scatter Plot

As predicted, the data did trend a bit. I was able to calculate a nice regressionary trend-line with the scatter plot and came up with the following formula, if you’d like to use it:

Let y = Amount Charged, x = Number of Followers you have

y = 0.0067x + 28110

According to this formula, I should be charging $28k for a show. Get your tickets, the show is selling out 😎.

Conclusion

That’s the extent I took the data I collected. Feel free to take a look at it on the open source Google Sheet. The Link is Below:

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I’m Musa Sulejmani, I’m the Founder & CEO of Volume Technologies, Inc., A student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and avid tech enthusiast. If you want to learn more about my start-up, hear my story of how I got to where I am, or want to follow my journey. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.