Draft: unlisted page, not part of the published blog yet.
Note from John
MusicBrainz keeps one "begin" date for every artist, but it means different things. For a person it is a birth date, and for a band it is the year the band formed. Those aren't comparable, so for "years in" I built my own start year for every artist. For a band, it is the formed date MusicBrainz lists (or, when there isn't one, the year of its first release). For a solo artist, it is the year of their first release under their own name, not their birth year. This is a convention I chose, not a fact about anyone's career. A solo artist who came out of a well-known band starts the clock at their first solo release: Bob Mould's start is 1989, not Hüsker Dü in 1979, and Johnny Marr's is 2013, not The Smiths' 1982. I count the person and the band separately, the way MusicBrainz does. Birth dates are used only in the age chart, and only for solo artists. MusicBrainz has a birth date for % of the solo albums here, so the age charts cover those. The albums released after an artist's death are left out of the career and age charts.
On a phone? Tap a dot or bar to see its details. These charts have more room on a laptop or tablet.
Each dot is one album on one year's list, placed by how many years the artist had been at it when the album came out. Gold is a solo woman, teal is a solo man, and purple is a band, the same as in the last post. The white line is the typical artist, the median for that year's list. Click a color in the key to look at one kind of artist, and hover any dot to see who it is.
Years in is the year an album came out minus the artist's start year, as described in the note at the top. The white line is the median for each year's list. Albums released after an artist's death are left out.
The dots above show every album on every list. The charts below break career stage into pieces and look at what else it's tied to: which record it is in an artist's catalog, how old the solo artists are, and who has stayed on the lists the longest.
The bottom of every column is crowded: in any year, plenty of artists are in their first few years. What changed is the middle of the chart. In the first decade, the typical artist on a list was years in. In the last ten years it was . The lists haven't stopped finding new names, but more of the room now goes to artists who have been around a while.
Years are one way to measure career stage. Another is to count releases: is this an artist's first record, or their fifth? Each cell below is the share of a year's numbered s that were that artist's 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and so on. ( of entries). EPs are a real part of many careers, especially in indie music, so by default they count. A word on "album": everywhere else in this series, "album" is the way KEXP uses it, for anything on the lists, which means LPs, EPs, and in two cases singles. MusicBrainz, where the release types come from, keeps "Album" for full-length LPs and files EPs and singles under their own types. So "studio albums only" below uses MusicBrainz's narrower meaning. Switch to it if you'd rather not count EPs. Hover a cell to see which artists it holds.
Numbers in the cells are percentages of that year's numbered s. A brighter cell means a bigger share.
Debuts fell from % of the numbered s in 2001–2010 to % in 2016–2025, while records from the fourth onward grew from % to %. Some of that is the same artists coming back, as the earlier posts showed. But the next chart asks a different question: for each artist, how far into their catalog were they the first time they made a list?
Each bar counts artists by which first put them on a list.
Most artists don't wait. About % first made a list with their debut and % by their second . But a long tail waits much longer. , three legendary artists whose vast catalogs mostly predate the KEXP Annual lists, all arrived late.
Ages only make sense for people, so this chart looks at solo artists only: how old they were when the album came out, split by gender and by period. Each dot is one album, and the white line marks the median.
The typical solo artist is in their early to mid thirties, and that hasn't moved much for women (median in 2001–2010, in 2016–2025). For men it has crept up, from to , and the share aged 40 or older has roughly doubled for both. Solo women are still the younger group: % of their albums in 2016–2025 came from artists under 25, against % for solo men.
Some artists turn up on the lists again and again. This chart follows the artists with seven or more albums on the lists. Each line runs from the artist's start to their last listed album, and each dot is an album, placed by the year it came out.
The open circle marks each artist's start. When an artist's first album came out in their start year, the circle sits around that dot, as it does for Iron & Wine and SAULT. The typical artist here got going around and has kept landing albums for about years, which is part of why the middle of the first chart is so full.
These long-haulers can look like they contradict the first post, which ended on the idea that the lists are less a fixed canon of favorites and more a constantly refreshing roster. Both are true. It depends on whether you count artists or spots on the list.
Most artists do pass through once: % of everyone who has made a list made exactly one. But a small group of repeat artists holds far more than its share of the spots. The % of artists with five or more albums hold % of all the entries, and the artists in the chart above are only % of artists but hold % of the spots. The door is still turning: about artists a year make a list for the first time, or roughly one spot in three. It is turning a little more slowly than it used to, though, and that matches what the first chart showed. So the best way to put the two ideas together is a revolving door with a regular cast.