Mac The Knife have been carefully and steadily releasing tracks and playing shows this year, and the payoff is starting to show up in the numbers in the form of rapid audience growth and strengthening playlist support. Overall, it feels like a band with the potential to take it up a notch in the coming months.
# releases: 3 – that’s only over six months or so though, and included the seven-track ‘In The Shadow Of It All‘ EP. While not a prolific output, it’s been steady and consistent.
Playlists appeared on*: 9 – while not a massive spread – and notably missing the big dogs of New Music Friday AU & NZ or the triple J New Music Hitlist – the jump in adds for last week’s release ‘Golden‘ is certainly worth noting (a top three performance, in fact, based on last week’s chart of the most-added artists on Australia’s best new music playlists). While the track itself is undeniably among their strongest, that’s still a signal of widening support among tastemakers.
Spotify followers**: It was these numbers that jumped out at me the most – more than doubling a Spotify following over six months is hard to do and rare to see. For a band at this stage of their journey, that’s obviously a very promising sign, but when added to the stronger playlist support, they should see that growth continue. In turn, that feeds into the algorithms to make it more likely that they pop up on even bigger playlists in the future, a virtuous circle of growth. Still bubbling under, but with strong potential to boil over in the short to medium term.
Listen to them on Spotify, or follow them on Instagram
—-
* 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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.