The number next to an artist's name on Mainely Tunes is our best honest estimate of how popular that band is right now — on a 0–100 scale, built only from real data. When we don't have enough data for a band, we say so instead of inventing a number.
Each band's score is a weighted average of up to five signals, each normalized to a 0–1 scale:
score = round(100 × ∑(effective weight × signal))
| Signal | Base weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Sold-out rate | 30% | Share of the band's tracked tour dates that sold out, trailing 12 months (minimum 3 tracked dates). Source: the ticket seller's own status feed. |
| Spotify / social | 25% | The best of several audience proxies — Spotify monthly listeners and follower counts on major social platforms — each log-normalized against a fixed anchor (100M listeners, 1B followers). |
| Albums & certifications | 20% | (studio albums + 3 × RIAA certifications) ÷ 20, capped at 1. |
| Radio play | 15% | Last.fm scrobbles as an airplay proxy, log-normalized against a 10M anchor. |
| StubHub resale | 10% | Resale listing count and markup vs. face value for shows in the next ~30 days. Computed only for the State Theatre acts we track — it is unavailable for every other band. |
A signal we don't have is excluded, not guessed: its effective weight becomes 0% and the remaining weights are scaled up so they still sum to 100%. Every score's footnote lists each signal with the exact effective weight used for that band — a signal at 0% is named with the reason (e.g. “StubHub resale 0% — no resale data”), never silently dropped.
If no signal is computable for a band, there is no score at all: the listing shows “insufficient data” rather than a fabricated number.
Scores recompute in full once a week. The sold-out signal refreshes as new crawl data lands.
Right now most bands show “insufficient data” — and that's by design. Our signal feeds are still being built:
As each feed comes online, scores appear automatically. Nothing on this page will ever be backfilled with estimates.
Free data sources only. No subscriptions, no paid tiers — the index runs on the same free stack as the rest of Mainely Tunes.