You can compare the performance of an artist over time to industry benchmarks calculated by Musicmetric. These show the average performance of artists in various segments of the music industry.

A Benchmark consists of an industry segment, which is a combination of genre (e.g. Rock) and popularity bracket (e.g. Top 100), applied to a metric (e.g. Facebook fans).

For example, the benchmark “Alternative Top 10, Fans – Facebook” shows the average number of new Facebook fans that a Top 10 Alternative artist gets per day.

Benchmarks are really useful as a reference point for artist metrics, and show if the artist is over or under performing within its bracket. By overlaying multiple benchmarks, you can get accurate insight into the performance of the artist against music trends as a whole.

Benchmark example

Benchmarks can be added to any time series chart. In this example, I’ve selected Lana Del Rey Facebook fans to compare to the average benchmark for a Top 10 Alternative artist.

Click “Add Benchmark” on the time series tool bar to bring down the Genre and Benchmark selectors, and choose the metrics that you would like to overlay:

When you have made your selection, click the “Add benchmark” button to overlay your benchmark on the time series:

There is now a dashed overlay on the graph which shows the average number of new Facebook fans a Top 10 Alternative artist gets per day. There is also summary data in the table below the graph.

As you can see, Lana Del Rey was below average in new Facebook fans per-day for a Top 10 Alternative artist, but has increased over December and now closely matches the benchmark.

Benchmarks and overlays

Don’t forget that all benchmarks and overlays are independent, so you can use both on the same time series. The graph below gives greater context to Lana Del Rey’s performance within the genre:

Try out more benchmarks and comparisons. One interesting thing to do is to compare multiple benchmarks over different metrics to show how different genres are growing in popularity on different social networks.