Who Dominates the 2017 Festival Season?

The font-size hierarchy of festival posters provides a convenient ranking system, with most announcements following a template from big-name headliners down to the locals and unknowns in vision-test type. So we devised a scoring system where the first act listed on a festival poster receives the highest score, which is equal to the total number of acts at the festival. For example, Bonnaroo 2017 lists U2 first and has 100 bands, so Bono and company receive a score of 100, followed by Red Hot Chili Peppers with 99, and so on down to Nashville singer-songwriter Aaron Lee Tasjan, who gets one point.

But there are a couple different ways to calculate the “winners” of a given festival season. Is it the musician popular enough to sign an exclusive (and lucrative) contract to headline just one marquee festival this year, or the act that turns up again and again near the top of posters throughout the summer?

We came up with scores for both definitions. The CLOUT tally is based on an act’s average placement on a poster, with more weight assigned for bigger festivals; the OMNI score assigns points for every festival a band plays, based on how high they rank on each poster, then adds them up. (You can sort by either measure and make your own meta-poster for the 2017 season using this interactive visualization.)

The CLOUT rankings are predictably dominated by those playing Coachella or Lollapalooza and nothing else: the Killers, Arcade Fire, Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga, and Radiohead.