Sunshine Coast guitar-poppers Betty Taylor have been dropping reliably rich, fun, and high-quality tracks across the year, and have been rewarded with solid early-stage audience growth and notably strong support from playlisters.
# releases: 3 – Three uploads so far this year – not a flat-out pace, but consistent and consistently high-quality.
Playlists appeared on*: 14 – This is what caught my eye. To bag spots on this sort of range of playlists (that I track), that puts them in the same tier of support as given to Teen Jesus & The Jean Teasers, Barkaa, or Rum Jungle. The quality of the lists matters too – each of the three releases earned them spots on Home & Hosed, while the most recent two bagged spots each time on Local Noise, Fresh Finds AU & NZ, Indie Arrivals, triple J Unearthed Best New Music and even two spots on New Music Friday AU & NZ. For an artist at this early stage, that’s a loud signal of punching above their weight in terms of critic support.
Spotify followers**: Again, it’s early days but there are bright green shoots. Turning that playlist support into actual followers & fans can be where it all falls down for any artist, but to have increased their follower base by 60% in just six months shows that’s something’s sticking.
If that support continues – which it should – and the quality of the songs stays as high as it has been – and there’s no reason to think it won’t – then there’s probably a there there. It might not quite be on fire yet, but there’s definitely both spark and fuel in place.
Listen to them on Spotify, or follow them on Instagram
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* I don’t track every single playlist in the whole world because that would be bonkers. The 40 or so that I do track are specifically chosen because they focus on new music by Australian artists – this narrows down the set to a manageable size, showing who’s supporting an artist before any given track has already blown up. Basically, I think it’s a solid dataset to show which artists are getting critic support.
** I tend to use Spotify Followers as the key metric to watch, instead of Monthly Listeners or Popularity. Monthlies are great, but they can be messed up by an artist being a contributor or songwriter on another artist’s track, and (along with Popularity) can fluctuate pretty wildly. Followers implies a conscious choice of preference from a user, so for me is the strongest and steadiest signal of solid, ongoing audience support.
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