Finding a project's core markets from its own data
Your biggest cities are usually just the biggest cities. A method for separating markets where you genuinely over-perform, and how to run it in Backline against your own audience data.
Danny Angove
Co-founder, Backline · 11 August 2026 · 5 min read
In short
- A ranked list of your biggest cities mostly reproduces a ranked list of the biggest streaming cities. It is not a finding.
- The useful measure is over-index: your share of listeners in a market against that market's expected share. Two minutes of arithmetic changes the whole picture.
- Cross-check every candidate market against a second independent signal before acting: in Backline, listener geography sits beside ticket sales, campaign performance and search demand in one project view.
- Peak listeners against current listeners tells you whether a market is growing, holding or was a moment two years ago.
- A core market is one where you over-index, at least two signals agree, and there is a plausible reason. Three or four of those is a plan.
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 same project, ranked two ways
IllustrativeThe 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.
Backline gives you the numerator for free. A project's audience geography is reported city by city and country by country, so you can read your share of listeners in a market straight off the page rather than assembling it from exports. Because the same view also carries catalogue size and per-platform totals, you can sanity check an over-index against how much music the project actually has out there, which is the correction people skip: a two track project over-indexing in one city is a different claim from a thirty track catalogue doing it.
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.
The reason this step gets skipped is that those six signals normally live in six places, and nobody opens six tabs to test a hunch about Utrecht. Backline is one dashboard per project with all of them on it: listener geography, smart link clicks by country, Google Search Console demand for the project's own site, press coverage, Meta and Google Ads performance, and live shows with their ticket sales. Testing a candidate market against a second independent signal stops being a research task and becomes a scroll.
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.
Reading current listeners against peak
Illustrative| Pattern | What it means | Action | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current at or near peak | Market is live right now | Spend, route, pitch local press | |
| Current at 60 to 80 percent of a recent peak | A moment that is fading | Recoverable with activity, act soon | |
| Current under half of a peak over a year old | Historic market | Context only, do not invest | |
| Current above previous peak | Actively growing | Highest priority for live and paid | |
| Peak set during a placement | Playlist audience, not yours | Re-read three weeks after it ends |
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:
- It over-indexes. Above 1 on the calculation above.
- Two independent signals agree. From different collection mechanisms, not two views of the same feed.
- Current is close to peak. Or peak is recent enough to be recoverable.
- 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.
You can also just ask for it. Ask Backline AI answers from the project's own connected data, so a question about core markets is answered from that project's listener geography, links, tickets and campaigns rather than from a general model of the music industry, and it tells you which of those it read.
Asking for the core markets, with the working shown
IllustrativeWhich cities is Nine Mile Tide genuinely over-performing in, rather than just big in, and what else agrees?
Data readAudience geographySmart linksSearchLive showsAdvertisingNews
Three cities look like real markets rather than size effects.
Manchester: eighth by raw listeners, first once you divide by the market's expected share. Landing page clicks from the United Kingdom over-represent it as well, and the November show is at 81 percent sold with nine weeks to go. Two independent signals agree.
Dublin: twelfth by raw listeners, second by over-index. Current listeners are 4 percent above the previous peak, so this is growing rather than fading, and branded search demand from Ireland has roughly doubled since April.
Utrecht: nineteenth raw, third by over-index, but the absolute number is 640 monthly listeners. I would treat this as a watch item rather than a plan until it clears about a thousand.
London and Los Angeles are first and second on raw listeners and sixth and ninth on over-index, which is what you would expect from their size rather than from anything the project has done.
Nothing in the press coverage or the ad spend explains Manchester or Dublin, so the cause is probably local: a support slot, a station, or a scene. Worth asking the agent before you spend against it.
Illustrative example using a fictional project. The assistant reports what the project's own connected data shows and flags Utrecht as too small to act on rather than ranking it first.
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.
Then keep the list live rather than filing it. Markets move, and a core market list built in February is a historical document by August. In Backline the geography sits in the same project view as the shows, the spend and the press, so the list gets revisited every time anyone opens the project, and surge alerts flag a market that starts moving between reviews. If a label or an agent needs the working, a branded report of the same numbers downloads in a click, and a scheduled email report can put the current version in front of them monthly without anyone rebuilding it.
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.
Common questions
- How do I find an artist's strongest markets?
- Do not use the raw ranking of biggest cities, which mostly reproduces the biggest streaming markets globally. Divide your share of listeners in each market by that market's expected share to get an over-index figure, then confirm any candidate against a second independent signal such as landing page clicks, branded search demand, radio airplay or local press. Backline reports listener cities and countries alongside those cross-checks in one project view, so both steps happen in the same sitting.
- How many independent signals do I need before acting on a market?
- Two, from different collection mechanisms. Spotify city data plus YouTube or SoundCloud country data counts, as does streaming plus your own landing page clicks or Search Console demand. Two views of the same provider's feed does not count.
- What does peak listeners tell me that current listeners does not?
- Whether a market is arriving, holding or gone. Current close to peak means the market is live now. Current well below a peak set more than a year ago means something happened historically and did not stick, which makes it poor ground for a tour date however large the raw number.
Sources
- 1Music Business Worldwide, 2026. Half of all paid music streams globally still take place in just 4 countries
- 2Spotify, 2026. Loud and Clear: takeaways
- 3Google, Reviewed August 2026. Search Console API: Search Analytics query reference
Danny Angove
Co-founder, Backline
Danny Angove is a co-founder of Backline. He works on the music business side of the platform: what managers, labels and independent artists actually need to see, and which numbers are worth arguing about.
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