Don West has put on a burst of speed over recent months, picking up a ton of audience and pricking up the ears of tastemakers across the board. So much so, in fact, it feels a bit like the blue touch-paper has been lit, and it’s time to stand well back.
# releases: 3 – Three uploads in six months is a steady drop of new material, implying a solid bag of songs might waiting in the background.
Playlists appeared on*: 12 – Notably, each of these releases appeared on New Music Friday AU & NZ, with an additional slot on the triple J New Music Hitlist, as well as pickups from a broad spread of major and independent playlisters. That spread is growing as well, with his latest track ‘Friends‘ being among the most playlisted tracks this week.
Spotify followers**: Picking up Spotify followers at a rapid clip, the last six month has seen his audience grow more than five-fold, starting with less than 3k followers, but now pushing towards 20k. That’s a massive rise in a short period of time for an emerging artist, and a testament to how sticky the songs are, efficiently converting listeners to fans.
Listen to him on Spotify, or follow him 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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