Spring 2013 & Spring 2015

While booking concerts in college, I had access to prices artists charge for booking concerts (when you’re not sharing revenues from ticket sales). If an artist’s popularity is relatively constant, their price is as well.

When an artist gets popular quickly, their price takes a while to catch up to their popularity. If you can book someone going through this, you can get a big-name artist at bargain prices.

I used Google Trends to manually go through a list of artists to find opportunities like this in 2013. We booked Ed Sheeran right as he was getting extremely popular, and the show was still a few months away. By the time he played our show, his popularity had skyrocketed. We had to move to a larger venue because tickets sold out nearly immediately in our first choice of venue.

After learning to code, I automated this process using a web scraper and the Spotify API. My program compares an artist’s popularity on Spotify with their price to generate a number. Sorting by this value highlights the most undervalued artists.

The music industry is fond of lawyers, not innovation. Despite showing how this can help artists charge what they’re really worth, all attempts to build this for both booking agencies and artist management agencies have not been well received. “This isn’t how we do things” is the most common response.

There’s no UI, but it’s one of the more valuable things I’ve ever built.