Today’s live music industry faces an important problem: finding venues that help expose emerging artists to wider audiences. However, in order to encounter these venues, live music data are needed; something that is quite difficult to be obtained.

Motivated by this lack of data both on social media and music streaming platforms, one of the FuturePulse partners CERTH, developed VenueRank, an algorithm that instead infers important venues through social media data.

In their paper, Emmanouil Krasanakis, Emmanouil Schinas, Symeon Papadopoulos, Yiannis Kompatsiaris and Pericles Mitkas explain that VenueRank employs bipartite graph ranking algorithms to help jointly discover important venues and popular artists in artist-venue graphs mined from social media data, such as Facebook events. The devised algorithms are actually a modification of a well-established algorithm’s whose outcome depends on the graph's structure and not prior ranks of venues and artists.

In specific, VenueRank will be incorporated in FuturePulse platform which will collect and analyze data from multiple sources around new artists, especially in the case of more complex music genres, in order to: 

• predict the audience demographics
• discover and recommend artists that will be a good match for a venue
• support the end users in pricing the artists for live events. 

 
 

Based on information provided though Spotify Analytics by one of our consortium members, Playground Music Sweden, we demonstrated that, when VenueRank is applied on a social media artist-venue graph, it can identify which venues are correlated with more popular or emerging artists and thus actively contribute to increasing their Spotify listeners.


Furthermore, a significant finding is that social media raw popularity metrics (engagement) present a lower correlation than the one leveraged by VenueRank. This means that the graph structure could be more important than social media metrics when predicting high-exposure venues. More importantly, it shows that there is a clear link between graph structure and venue exposure that increases artist popularity.

Why is this important for the live music industry?

From the music artists’ point of view, it is important for their live performances to gain as much exposure as possible, since audience size automatically affects their popularity. The expected exposure could be valuable for the artists’ agents also. So, having access to available venues ranked according to expected exposure, can definitely be a significant decision criterion for both parties.

 

You can read more about VenueRank here.