With the revenue from touring accounting for 60-80% of most artists’ incomes, developing a career as a live performer has never been more important.

Fortunately for those building their touring business, new data from Bandsintown and Live Nation confirm a trend that we’ve seen for more than a year now: ticket sales for non-superstar artists are growing.

"Recent data confirms that, for the first time ever, developing artists - including DIY musicians and artists without labels - are key drivers of industry growth," writes Bandsintown managing partner Fabrice Sergent in a new Billboard op-ed.

Last month, Live Nation announced strong Q2 earnings, and chairman and CEO Michael Rapino pointed to growth in ticket sales for smaller artists as a major contributing factor. "Ticket revenue from concerts outside strong our top 100 artists is up 32% so far this year," he stated, "demonstrating that the demand for live music is strong and growing from the largest stadiums to the local clubs."

Adding to that sentiment, Bandsintown’s Fabrice Sergent confirms that our platform has seen the same shift.

"Bandsintown's data confirms fans' passion for new artists, as well as this growing emphasis on developing artists," writes Sergent. "Fifty million registered users and 130 million unique monthly interactions with active music fans have made Bandsintown a trusted industry source of data gathered from millions of concert-goers and agnostic of any specific geography, promoter, or ticketing platform."

"The number of separate shows for which Bandsintown fans bought tickets for, in the first semester of 2019, is up 84% compared to the same period last year. In 2016, only 36% of all fans' intent to buy tickets through Bandsintown ("buy tickets" clicks) went to developing artists' shows. Now, in 2019, intent to buy tickets for shows of developing artists rose to 50%.  Each week, Bandsintown refers 1.8 million fans (out of a total of 3.6 million referrals) to ticketing sites for shows of developing artists. Thus far in 2019, 40% of music fans using Bandsintown RSVP'd to a show of an artist with fewer than 100,000 followers and 50% of Bandsintown users declared they have attended the shows of artists that they were not familiar with prior to Bandsintown's recommendation."

Read the full piece on Billboard.