The Discovery Myth: How Artists Break

The music industry still talks about artists being “discovered” as though there is a moment when someone important finds them, signs them and puts a plan around them and that is when the artist starts to break.

In my experience, it is usually much messier than that.

Quite often, the audience gets there first. A small group of people finds an artist, start listening obsessively, shares the music, talks about it with other people and gradually brings more people in. Sometimes that audience is in a market the artist has never even visited. Sometimes it is a completely unexpected group of people that nobody around the artist was looking at.

By the time the music industry starts paying attention, there is already something happening and I have spent a lot of my career trying to understand that point. At EMI, I was working on global digital campaigns at a time when digital was starting to give us much better visibility into how audiences behaved in different markets. At Warner, I saw it through a different lens with Firepit Tech, where we worked with technology companies and artists signed at Warner to understand how technology could help artists grow.

The technology was never the starting point. We had to understand the artist, the audience, the culture around them and most importantly, where there was already momentum. We needed the data to see what was happening and then the judgement to work out what it meant. If we didn’t understand what was already working, there was no point trying to introduce technology to help grow it.

That became even more interesting during my time as Global Head of Music at SoundCloud. One of the things I found particularly valuable was being able to see the behaviour of people who were finding artists early. Through SoundCloud Insights, we were able to give artists and their teams a much better understanding of who was listening, where those listeners were, how they were engaging and which fans were coming back. The idea of “first fans” became important because those early listeners can tell you a lot about what is starting to happen around an artist.

The SoundCloud section we created for the 2024 IMS Business Report looked at this in more detail, particularly the role that SoundCloud communities were playing as early tastemakers in music culture. We were seeing emerging artists build momentum with groups of fans before they had anything that looked like mainstream success.

Kenya Grace was a good example. During her Ascending campaign in March 2023, her daily listeners grew from around 800 to more than 100,000. “Strangers” subsequently became a mainstream hit and reached number one in the UK. What interested me was being able to see that audience building while it was happening, rather than looking back at the artist afterwards and pretending the success had appeared from nowhere.

That is the part of discovery that I think the music industry sometimes misses. The audience is often doing the discovering long before the industry gives it a name. Social media accelerated this considerably during Covid in 2020. Artists could build audiences directly, and those audiences could come from anywhere. That made it much easier to see when something unusual was happening in a particular market or within a particular group of people.

I saw this clearly with two female artists signed at Warner who we worked with through Firepit Tech. One UK-signed artist had developed a significant following in Asia, particularly Japan, before there was comparable recognition elsewhere. We could see that something was working with that audience and use what we were learning to help facilitate more exposure and fandom across the region.

Another UK-signed female artist had built a strong following in Germany before she had broken through in the UK. That German audience mattered when we were looking at how to build her first official single in the UK because it was evidence that people outside her home market were already deeply invested in what she was doing.

Neither situation was simply about looking at a country on a map and deciding to market an artist there. The data gave us the signal but you still had to understand why those people cared and what was happening culturally around the artist. That is the bit that gets lost when data is treated as an answer rather than something that helps you ask better questions.

I think that is also why I have always been interested in the relationship between technology, data and culture. Technology can give you access to information that would have been much harder to see before, but it doesn’t replace judgement. You still need to understand people.

And then there is what happens when the music industry gets involved. I have seen artists build genuine momentum and then lose some of it once too many people become involved. Suddenly there are more opinions, more meetings and more people trying to work out what the artist should do next. Decisions that might once have been instinctive become overthought. Sometimes the artist is asked to change the very thing that made people interested in them in the first place.

The music industry is very good at recognising momentum. It isn’t always very good at preserving it.

There is ego involved on both sides. Artists can understandably become defensive when people who have only just arrived start telling them what needs to change, but artists also need to be open to challenge and to people who can help take something further. The industry has a responsibility too. Experience matters, but having done something successfully before doesn’t mean you automatically understand what is happening in front of you now.

You have to listen to the artist and the audience before deciding what needs to change. You have to understand why people have connected with the music and what is making them care enough to come back and bring other people with them. That trust takes time to build. You can’t build that kind of trust in a meeting about a release date.

For me, the most useful way to think about breaking an artist is therefore not to ask who is going to discover them, but to understand where people are already finding them and what is making them stay. Sometimes the earliest evidence is in the data. Sometimes it is in a particular community, a particular market or a group of fans behaving differently from everyone else. Usually, you need both the data and the cultural understanding to see what is happening.

The opportunity is then to build on that momentum without managing it to death, because very often the artist wasn’t discovered by the industry at all.

The audience found them first.