The Unlikely Odds of Making it Big

3,180 bands that played multiple shows from 2013-2016

On July 17, 2013, the band Sylvan Esso headlined the 250 person capacity Mercury Lounge. Sylvan Esso was one of over 7,000 bands to play a small show in the NYC area that year. The duo had just released their debut singles Play it Right and Hey Mami. The band had some buzz, but hyped indie bands often come and go.

Sylvan Esso was not one of them. About two years later, they headlined a sold-out show at Terminal 5 — a 3,000 person capacity venue in NYC. There could be little doubt that Sylvan Esso had “made it”.

In the video below, you can see thousands of Sylvan Esso fans sing along to the playful synth-pop of “Hey Mami”.

“That was crazy.” Sylvan Esso’s beat-maker Nick Sanborn told the Village Voice after the show. “I don’t know how to put stuff like that into perspective… I think we both just feel really lucky that people get what we’re trying to say.”

Sanborn was right to feel amazed. What happened to his band is rare.

According to data from the music event website Songkick, of the 7,000 bands that headlined a small venue (less than 700 capacity) in the NYC area in 2013, less than half even played another show from 2014 to October of 2016.

Of the bands that did play again, only 400 of them headlined a show at a venue with a capacity greater than 700 people.

But only 21 out of the 7,000 bands reached Sylvan Esso’s level of “making it”: headlining a show of over 3,000 capacity. Any act that headlines a venue of this size has reached a level of success that they could have barely dreamed of (with the possible exception of Kanye West). The following list shows some of the 21 bands who made it, and when and where they hit it big.

A Great Big World
Date: July 23, 2014
Venue: Manhattan Center

Sam Smith
Date: September 18, 2014
Venue: United Palace Theatre

Bastille
Date: October 9, 2014
Venue: Radio City Music Hall

Lake Street Dive
Date: November 14, 2014
Venue: Terminal 5

Sylvan Esso
Date: January 23, 2015
Venue: Terminal 5

London Grammar
Date: January 27, 2015
Venue: Terminal 5

Chet Faker
Date: April 04, 2015
Venue: Terminal 5

Chance the Rapper
Date: October 23, 2015
Venue: Terminal 5

X Ambassadors
Date: May 13, 2016
Venue: Terminal 5

Mayer Hawthorne
Date: June 24, 2016
Venue: Terminal 5

And the remaining 11 others who made it...

5 Seconds of Summer
Chase Rice
Disclosure
Gorgon City
Houndmouth
Lucius
Mac DeMarco
Misterwives
Rudimental
Shakey Graves
Sturgill Simpson

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.

Making it big

How long it takes to make it

Everybody else