Answers
How do labels actually find unsigned artists?
The three majors use tools nobody else can buy — Sodatone belongs to Warner, Instrumental works under contract to all three, and Musiio was absorbed into SoundCloud — so everyone else is working from the same handful of public dashboards.
The tier you cannot buy
This is the part usually left out of the listicles. The most capable discovery tooling in the industry was bought rather than sold: Sodatone went to Warner, Instrumental serves the majors under contract, and Musiio disappeared into SoundCloud. None of it has a price page, because none of it is for sale.
So the working answer to "what do labels use" depends entirely on which label. A major has an in-house signal desk. Everyone else has a subscription to a chart tool.
What everyone else has
A small number of streaming-analytics platforms, priced per user per month, all reading the same public APIs — Spotify counts, playlist adds, follower curves, social growth. They are good at what they do and they are not differentiated from each other by very much, because the underlying data is the same data.
The consequence is the thing worth noticing: if every desk is running the same filters over the same feeds, every desk is being shown the same artists on the same morning. Discovery stops being an edge at the moment it is automated for everyone.
Where the work moved
To what happens after the shortlist. Knowing an artist is trending is now cheap. Knowing whether the trend is forty people or one person forty times, who else has already been in touch, what the record actually sounds like against the last three you signed, and whether there is a route to a human — that is still mostly done by hand, and mostly not done at all.
That is the part worth automating now, and it is a different problem from surfacing a name.
Where this number comes from.
Checkable
A complete file on one artist takes 3 minutes 06 at the median and 6 minutes 02 at the 95th percentile — and every claim in it is stored with its source, the sentence it came from, a confidence figure and a fingerprint that stops the same claim being counted twice. Audience chatter is counted by distinct occurrence, so forty people saying something is not recorded the way one person saying it forty times is.
The durations are elapsed wall-clock on completed runs over 10,430 metered operations between 23 August and 2 September 2026. The de-duplication is a uniqueness rule on the record itself, so a repeat cannot be filed even by accident.
See it on your own board.
Every new account starts with $5 of credit and no card — enough to put an artist on the board and read the whole file on them.