Does a great Coachella performance affect streaming stats?

Here’s how performing at Coachella may or may not help Coachella artists’ social and streaming stats.

by Rutger Ansley Rosenborg from Chartmetric’s How Music Charts.

Every year Coachella rolls around, all eyes are on the headliners. This year, that meant Harry Styles, Billie Eilish, and Swedish House Mafia x The Weeknd — names so ubiquitous, with stats so massive, that Coachella probably won’t be the biggest show they play in 2022. But what about some of the artists that don’t get so much typographical real estate? How do they fare in contrast?

First, let’s set a baseline. In the last month, here’s how Coachella 2022 headliners grew across various platforms.

The Coachella headliner artist stats that grew most in the past month:

• Harry Styles: Chartmetric Artist Score (105 percent), Spotify Monthly Listeners (82 percent), and YouTube Channels Views (4 percent)
• Swedish House Mafia: Twitter Retweets (369 percent), TikTok Followers (32 percent), and Wikipedia Views (279 percent)

The Coachella headliner artist stats that grew least in the past month:

• The Weeknd: Chartmetric Artist Score (-7 percent) and Spotify Monthly Listeners (-1 percent)
• Harry Styles: Twitter Retweets (-74 percent)
• Swedish House Mafia: YouTube Channels Views (0 percent)
• Billie Eilish: TikTok Followers (1 percent) and Wikipedia Views (-91 percent)

Clearly, Harry Styles and Swedish House Mafia benefited most, at least digitally speaking, from their Coachella performances, and Twitter Retweets and Wikipedia Views seemed to reflect the most reactivity of these six metrics overall. 

For non-headlining Coachella artists like BADBADNOTGOOD, Chicano Batman, Japanese Breakfast, and Eyedress, we should expect to see more Coachella-influenced digital signals due to their comparatively smaller stats. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case across the board.

The Coachella non-headliner artist stats that grew most in the past month:

• BADBADNOTGOOD: Chartmetric Artist Score (118 percent) and Twitter Retweets (1271 percent)
• Japanese Breakfast: Spotify Monthly Listeners (27 percent) and TikTok Followers (32 percent)
• Eyedress: YouTube Channel Views (6 percent)
• Chicano Batman: Wikipedia Views (279 percent)

The Coachella non-headliner artist stats that grew least in the past month:

• Japanese Breakfast: Chartmetric Artist Score (-20 percent), Twitter Retweets (-79 percent), and Wikipedia Views (20 percent)
• BADBADNOTGOOD: Spotify Monthly Listeners (-5 percent) and YouTube Channels Views (-3 percent)
• Chicano Batman: TikTok Followers (0 percent)

Interestingly, the benefit spread seems to be a bit more equitable for non-headlining Coachella artists. In other words, each non-headlining artist is represented as a top grower on at least one platform. Importantly, Twitter and Wikipedia exhibit the most reactivity for non-headlining Coachella artists as well, while Spotify and YouTube growth remains relatively negligible.

Check out the average growth stats for all eight Coachella artists in the last month, for instance:

• Chartmetric Artist Score: 24%
• Spotify Monthly Listeners: 14%
• Twitter Retweets: 199%
• YouTube Channel Views: 2%
• TikTok Followers: 11%
• Wikipedia Views: 105%

Only Twitter and Wikipedia average more than 100 percent growth for both headlining and non-headlining artists, while Spotify, TikTok, and YouTube average below 15 percent. The question, then, especially for artists who are lucky enough to play Coachella but may not reach more than a 16-point font size on the festival poster, is how to convert that Twitter timeliness and Wikipedia curiosity into cross-platform success — especially once touring expenses have totally emptied the novelty from that Coachella paycheck.

To see how these artists — or any of the 7.5M artists in our database — have grown in the last month, three months, six months, year, or virtually any time period you want, check out our redesigned Social & Streaming Stats sectionon any artist page. And if you want to see who might be a good fit for next year’s Coachella lineup, search “Coachella” on our new Brands page.