Darcie Haven topped this week’s Most Playlisted, which gives me the perfect excuse to highlight just how fast she’s picking up audience as well as securing tastemaker support.
# releases: 4
With four releases over the previous year, it’s been a steady, although not hectic, release schedule for Darcie Haven, but one which has seen her end one cycle with the release of ‘Fault Line’ and the ‘Better Left Unsaid’ EP in April and May of last year, then moving briskly into a new round of releases, with ‘In It Alone’ appearing in November of 2024 and ‘Hounds’ released just last week. Making sure there was no year-long gap between cycles was the right move, and likely helped keep up the momentum kick-started by the EP release.
Playlists appeared on*: 14
The pace of releases has delivered enough quantity without sacrificing quality though. Three of those releases were picked up by Spotify’s New Music Friday AU & NZ, and two by triple J’s New Music Hitlist, two of the largest and most important playlists for new music in Australia. It’s also notably hard to make it onto both of them, and for two releases to have achieved that is notable, especially for a more emerging artist.
Spotify followers**: +4.3k | +345%
The speed of increase in Spotify followers here is significant, more so than the scale – breaking out of the 1k follower level is a hard step, but attracting over three thousand new followers in less than twelve months to quadruple your followers is something that few artists do.
There’s a buzz here for sure, with audiences sticking around to support her just as much as the critics and playlisters.
Listen to them on Spotify, or follow them on Instagram
Facebook
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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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