Well, I guess this is blowing up. If you want to see what rapid audience growth looks like, look no further than ISHAN, whose numbers have gone ballistic in the last three months. Interestingly though, it looks like it’s all happened so fast that a lot of tastemakers missed it happening at all.
First of all, that growth. In the fastest and highest rising Spotify follower counts I’ve seen, ISHAN’s numbers have gone from the low hundreds a year ago – and around 1,500 even as recently as November last year – to an eye-watering *twenty-five thousand* just a few months later. That’s such fast growth over a year that the percentage growth is so large as to be meaningless.
I’m usually impressed when an act doubles in size in a year, while the last act I recall growing this quickly and this early was Royel Otis across 2021-2022. Today, that act is sitting on a still-growing audience of over 100k – but it still took them more than a year to grow that far, that fast, from that starting point.
What’s fascinating – to me, anyway – is how little of the “usual” playlist and critic support ISHAN has received along the way. Before this year, the only Australian new music playlist that has been on top of this artist has been, er, mine – which gives you an idea of how little of that growth has been driven by the playlist spots you’d normally expect to see.
Granted, latest release ‘My Mouth (la la la)’ has been a different kettle of fish, picking up spots from triple j (Home & Hosed and Unearthed Best New Music), and Spotify (New Music Friday AU&NZ) – however, that support came *after* the explosion in follower numbers.
ISHAN’s audience growth is most likely a product of social media (see his sizeable audiences on both Instagram and TikTok), but it’s too simplistic to say that this means that the only way to grow is via socials. In this case, it actually seems like a rare case where everything is beginning to work together and feed the other. My bet is that over the next few months you’ll see a LOT more playlisters jumping on board, which will add more fuel to an already strong-burning fire.
Right now, ISHAN is probably still most well-known on the internet for busking in Melbourne. Expect this to change as fast as his numbers have grown.
Well, I guess this is blowing up.
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* 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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