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Center for Popular Music Research Guide

This guide is a tool to learn more about the resources that exist at the Center for Popular Music and how they can be used to create an excellent research paper, project, or help with a personal interest.

About Pollstar

How to Use Pollstar

Pollstar has a single search box that you can use to find artists, companies, venues, or even cities. There is some basic data on the page like box office averages, average artist grosses, addresses, phone numbers, and websites, but the real gold mine is the contact information for artist management and venue staff. 

Searching by city leads to a list of all the concert and event venues in a city, and Pollstar automatically includes nearby cities. For example, if you search "Nashville, TN", it includes results for Franklin, Clarksville, and Mount Juliet.

In addition to artist, venue, city, and contact information, Pollstar has some interesting data on the "Charts" page, including a weekly ranking of the most popular artists in the world based on ticket sales, streaming, radio airplay, and social media numbers. It also has quarterly reports on the highest grossing tours and venue types (Ranging from stadiums to clubs.), annual concert market rankings, and radio airplay charts by format (Alternative, Country, Top 40 etc.)

You can save these charts as PDFs and also convert them to Excel spreadsheets using Adobe.