Making it big

In terms of how quickly they “made it”, Sylvan Esso are an anomaly. The band rose faster than any other US based band in our dataset—with less than two years between their first NYC show and headlining a big venue.

The long journey to popular success of the indie pop band Lucius is more typical. The Brooklyn based band played 24 small to medium sized shows in New York from 2009 to 2014, before headlining Terminal Five in December 2014.

The bands that make it from outside the U.S. are more likely to have short journeys to “making it”. Bands like Bastille and Disclosure had already seen significant success in their homelands before making their first appearance in the United States, and by the the time they returned for another tour they had really hit it big.

Let’s look at the different paths each band took to make it, including shows they opened and shows they headlined.

The vast majority of bands never do make it. Acts break up, give up or decide they have other things they want to do with their lives.

For every Chance the Rapper there are thousands of rappers that never play a show with more than a couple hundred people. For every Lake Street Dive, there are hundreds of promising bands that break up because they lost on their members.

To see the NYC concert trajectory of different bands, below you can search for any of the 3,000 bands that played a show in 2013, and at least one more show from 2014 to 2016. Perhaps some of them are on their way to making it, and it just hasn’t happened yet.