In a classic case of getting a break, Toby Hobart plugged away for a while before his early 2024 track ‘Feel The Same‘ achieved escape velocity with both playlisters and audiences, kicking off twelve months of solid growth.
# releases: 6 – While “Feel The Same” was the tipping point in Feb of 2024, he’s kept up a really strong release pace since then, with no less than five further singles in the year following.
Playlists appeared on*: 8 – Only a handful of Australian new music playlisters gave him space in 2023, but ‘Feel The Same‘ broke open a lot of doors. triple J’s Home & Hosed was an early backer, and has continued to champion him, while New Music Friday AU & NZ has added him twice in the last twelve months. This is really subjective (and may be wildly wrong) but that widening support looks and feels really genuine, less of the herd mentality that often happens. It doesn’t feel like the result of a PR campaign as much as it does a genuine reaction to the songs.
Spotify followers**: +5.4k / +308% – Across 2023, he was a bit stuck, audience-wise, picking up only a handful of new Spotify followers that year. The past twelve months saw that change, and quite dramatically too – the curve points sharply up (again directly after the release of ‘Feel The Same‘). Although starting from a low base, that rapid increase in follower count is a decent signal that Toby Hobart’s chance at taking it to the next level has come knocking.
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Slate Media
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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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