One of the many metrics Luminate tracks is an artist’s “awareness,” or the share of consumers who indicate they’re aware of an artist after being shown their name and picture. It is one of five components of Luminate’s Artist Index, but even as a stand-alone metric, artist awareness is particularly helpful for evaluating a given performer’s reach, both within their fanbase and across the general population.
So, what does it take for an artist to become a household name (artists with an awareness exceeding 40% of the U.S. general population age 13+) in the era of streaming and an increasingly fragmented music culture?
While high streaming counts and large social media followings are big contributors, those are just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, artists whose listenership is lopsided toward DSPs tend to have lower awareness than you’d expect.
Take Morgan Wallen, who is arguably the most DSP-oriented country artist. His awareness of 37% — slightly above 1 in 3 American consumers — is lower than we’d expect given his extremely high streaming volumes and persistent presence at the top of the charts.
Comparing Luminate’s artist awareness data — gathered for roughly 50 artists every quarter — alongside music consumption data, awareness tends to be higher among artists with multigenerational fanbases.
That’s partly why artists from older generations with enduring appeal (e.g., classic rock bands such as the Beatles or Queen) may have higher awareness than a modern artist with stronger stream counts.
For example, rapper Playboi Carti’s awareness among Gen Z is a strong 43% considering his popularity in online spaces, but his lower awareness with older generations brings his total percentage down to 17%. On the other hand, Lorde also has 43% awareness among Gen Z respondents, but her total awareness is at 40% since she’s also well known among Millennials and Gen X.
Similarly, artists can gain awareness by breaking out of the narrower DSP-driven music ecosystem and into a broader mass-media environment. This could be done via radio airplay, as is the case with Sabrina Carpenter. Her 2024 album, Short n’ Sweet, was a hit on streaming and social media platforms in Q3 2024, but ultimately her awareness grew in 2024 alongside her radio airplay.
Music artists making the jump to film or TV is another common route to mass recognition. Out of roughly 700 artists Luminate currently tracks, multimedia stars including Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande are all in the top 10 for overall awareness.
Jelly Roll provides another example of how a transmedia career (a key trend outlined in our just-released 2025 Year-End Music Report) can drive awareness. Jelly Roll’s appearance on TV in 2024 — with acting roles in Tulsa King and Fire Country, along with a steady presence on American Idol and WWE programming — coincides with rapid-fire growth in his awareness, which more than doubled from 2023 (27%) to 2025 (63% in Q2).
In addition to wide appeal, a major factor behind high awareness is time (and, arguably, luck). In other words, awareness typically takes longer to grow after artists have their initial “breakthrough,” presumably because it takes a while to percolate through the cultural landscape.
Bad Bunny’s growth in awareness over the 2020s demonstrates this phenomenon. Note that his awareness was just 33% in the quarter after the release of his 2022 crossover hit album Un Verano Sin Ti, despite it hitting the usual breakout milestones, such as topping the Billboard charts and going TikTok viral. It wasn’t until several quarters after the album’s successful release that Bad Bunny’s awareness jumped above the “household name” threshold of 40%.
Get in touch with Luminate Insights to dive deeper into the Artist Index to see how it relates to metrics such as streaming consumption, social media followerships and fan behaviors.
