Methodology

Our base layer is MiSFY's live registry: 22,079 verified venues across 169 countries, the events those venues announce, and multi-platform growth signals for artists — currently Instagram and YouTube as active channels, with Spotify and TikTok expanding. Figures on this site carry an as-of date; the current dataset is dated 2026-08-25.

GF Rising ranks artist momentum, not size. It is powered by MiSFY Score, which evaluates growth, consistency and acceleration across an artist's channels. We publish the evaluation areas and the channels; we do not publish weights, formulas, thresholds or recomputation schedules, to keep the score robust against gaming.

Two charts per country. GF Rising runs on both sides of a scene: an artist chart and a venue chart, scored the same way. Venues are ranked as accounts in their own right — the rooms whose audience is growing fastest — not by who played there.

Chart membership: artists and venues chart in the country their tracked profile is registered to — the home scene the data follows them in. Country charts read the primary data directly, with no event-matching in between.

Chart depth scales with coverage, and never exceeds half the pool it is drawn from — a list that holds most of its own field is a directory, not a ranking. Countries with at least 60 scored accounts run a Top 30; at least 40 run a Top 20; at least 20 run a Top 10. Below 20 the chart stays closed. Rank movement compares against the previous published week.

Every charted artist and venue carries a tier — Local, Regional, National or Continental. It is not a judgment, and it is not a claim about where anyone tours. It is a plain audience-size band, taken from the follower count on the tracked profile:

Local under 1,000 · Regional 1,000 to 10,000 · National 10,000 to 100,000 · Continental 100,000 to 1 million · World over 1 million.

World-tier artists are excluded from the artist chart entirely. An established star is not a rising one, and leaving them in lets sheer size crowd out the movement this chart exists to find. Venues are not filtered this way — a room's following says something about the room, not about a career, and an arena is a legitimate part of a scene’s map. So a World-tier venue can and does appear on a venue chart, while a World-tier artist never appears on an artist one.

We print the band because a momentum chart routinely seats a 700-follower band next to a 400,000-follower headliner, and a reader is entitled to know which is which before reading anything into the ranking. The tier changes nothing about the score: rank is momentum, and momentum only. A local act can and does finish above a continental one.

Genre on an artist is evidence-based, never guessed. We assign it from what the record shows, weighted strongest to weakest: performance data first (an artist listed in a show's cast or title, or programmed by a venue whose own genre is established), then how the artist entered our tracking (a genre-specific collection route, an editorial review), and last, self-declaration — a genre stated outright in the artist's own name or profile text, matched by fixed keywords rather than interpretation.

Stronger evidence always outranks weaker: a self-declared tag can only decide a genre when nothing harder exists, and it carries a lower confidence in our records. Where nothing at all supports a call, we leave the genre blank rather than invent one — that is why some charted artists show no genre.

The activity figures shown in the top strip are counts of tracked venue events with a confirmed date inside the trailing 28 days, per country. They measure what our registry sees announced — a coverage-weighted signal, not a census of everything that happens in a city.

Every charted artist and venue has a reference page carrying its score, its rank, the pool it was ranked in and the record we hold on it — the appearances we have matched to an artist, the announced dates we hold on a room. These are records, not articles: nobody writes them, and they change when the data changes.

We only submit one to a search engine when it holds at least 3 rows of documented record — appearances for an artist, announced dates and matched line-ups for a room. Below that the page is four figures and a sentence — true, useful if you arrived from a chart, and not something worth putting in front of somebody searching. Those pages stay live, stay linked and stay open to crawlers; they are marked noindex and left out of the sitemap. A page crosses the line the week its record does, with nothing to edit.

Charts publish weekly for every scene we cover. Written pieces do not. A piece is written when the data crosses a threshold we set in advance — never to fill a slot, and never because a country exists. The triggers are: a chart debut (a first entry), a rank surge or slide of at least 3 places, a peak score — the week a score crosses the 85 rising threshold from below, not merely sitting above it — and a chart opening when a scene crosses our coverage line. Standing still at a high score is what the chart already says; it is not news.

Every trigger that fires is logged on its desk page, whether or not it became a story. We cap written pieces at 9 a week across all desks, at most one per desk, on top of one weekly global report. If nothing clears the bar, nothing is written that week. A quiet week is allowed to be quiet.

How often a scene is eligible depends on how deep our coverage of it is, measured by combined scored pool (artists plus venues): at least 1,000 carries a weekly beat, at least 200 a monthly roundup, and below that a scene charts but does not carry written pieces — the pool is too shallow to support a story. The one exception is a chart opening, which is reportable anywhere, because that is our coverage itself expanding.

A trigger is not enough on its own. MiSFY Score measures momentum, not size, so a chart can be topped by an artist we know almost nothing about — a few hundred followers, one platform, no documented dates. That is a legitimate chart entry and an impossible subject for a written piece. Before anything is written we check how much verifiable record the subject actually carries: audience, presence beyond a single platform, documented dates we hold, and whether their genre rests on hard evidence. Below our threshold the signal is logged on the desk page and nothing is written. Selection stays data-driven; this is what stops it selecting an empty page.

One trigger is currently built but switched off: swings in scene activity. Trailing-window event counts run below prior windows across every country at once, which looks like ingest lag rather than real contraction. We will not report a movement we cannot yet separate from our own collection schedule.

Data Desk pieces start from a locked extract of the numbers. Drafting is AI-assisted; every published piece is edited, fact-checked against the extract, and approved by a human editor. Charts are generated directly from the data with no editorial adjustment — we never move a rank.

Think a number about you is wrong? Write to [email protected]. We check the underlying data, correct genuine errors, and log corrections publicly.