Finding a project's core markets from its own data

Every project's top cities list looks similar: London, Los Angeles, New York, Mexico City, São Paulo, Jakarta, Berlin. Those cities appear because they are enormous and because streaming is concentrated. Luminate's reporting has noted that around half of all paid music streams globally come from just four countries, so a top-cities list is describing the world before it describes you.

What you want is where a project punches above its weight.

Over-indexing

Take your listeners in a market as a share of your total. Take that market's share of a reasonable reference, which can be your own genre's distribution, the platform's overall distribution, or in the simplest version, your project's total audience compared with a comparable artist's.

over_index = (your share of listeners in market) / (market's expected share)

Above 1 means you are stronger there than the market's size explains. Below 1 means you are riding the market's size.

The reordering is the point. Cities that vanish from the top of your list were never yours, and cities that appear are the ones where something real has happened, usually radio, a press piece, a support slot or a local scene connection.

You do not need a perfect reference to do this. Even a rough one reorders the list enough to change decisions, and the reordering is stable across reasonable choices of reference.

Then cross-check

An over-index on one source is a hypothesis. Confirm it with a second, independent signal before spending money.

Signals that can confirm a market:

• Listener geography from a second platform. SoundCloud or YouTube country data behaving the same way as Spotify city data is meaningful, because the platforms have different user bases.
• Landing page clicks by country from your own links, which is your own first-party measurement rather than a provider's.
• Search demand. Branded queries reaching your own site from that country, via Search Console.
• Radio airplay in that region.
• Press coverage from outlets based there.
• Ticket sales history, if you have played there.

Two agreeing signals from different mechanisms is a market. One signal is a data artefact until proven otherwise.

Current against peak

Most listener-geography data carries both a current figure and a peak. The relationship between them is the cheapest piece of insight available.

• Current near peak: the market is live now, act on it.
• Current well below peak, peak recent: a moment that has faded, and probably recoverable with activity.
• Current well below peak, peak years old: a historic market. Something happened in 2023 and it did not stick. Interesting context, poor investment.

I would not route a tour without looking at this. A city that peaked eighteen months ago and has drifted since will not sell like the raw number suggests.

What makes a core market

Four conditions, and I would want all four before it goes on a plan:

1. It over-indexes. Above 1 on the calculation above.
2. Two independent signals agree. From different collection mechanisms, not two views of the same feed.
3. Current is close to peak. Or peak is recent enough to be recoverable.
4. There is a plausible story. A support slot, a radio station, a scene, a sync in local media, a diaspora connection. If nobody can explain why a market is strong, it is more often a data quirk than an opportunity.

Three or four markets meeting all four conditions is a genuinely useful output, and it is what a tour route, a paid media plan and a press push should all be built from.

What to do with the answer

Paid media. Spend into markets that already respond. Widening into markets that do not is the most common way to waste a release budget.

Live. Hand the list to the agent with the evidence attached. An agent's judgement plus your data beats either alone, and the conversation is much better when the numbers are in front of both of you.

Press and radio. Local outlets in an over-indexing market are far more likely to say yes, and a small local piece in a strong market outperforms a national piece in a weak one.

Language and timing. A market in a different timezone deserves posts and announcements at a sensible local hour, which sounds obvious and is skipped constantly.

What to avoid

Do not act on a city with a small absolute number, however dramatic the over-index. There is a floor below which the arithmetic is noise, and for most projects it is somewhere in the low hundreds of listeners.

And do not confuse a market where a playlist audience lives with a market that is yours. Playlist-driven geography reflects the playlist's audience, and it drains away with the placement. Wait a few weeks after a placement ends before reading geography, for the same reason you wait to judge the placement itself.