Dance Industry Music Stories turns 451 issues of the IMS Industry Insider newsletter (December 2017 to August 2026) into a structured dataset: 19,309 events linked to 10,842 entities, each headline traceable to its original issue. It is built by Audience Strategies, a strategic consultancy specialising in audience insight, as part of its music and culture research practice.
Each weekly newsletter is parsed into discrete events: a headline, its publication source, an event type, and the entities it mentions. Events are extracted with language-model assistance, then normalised and classified before they enter the dataset. The structured events live in a database from which every visualisation on this site is pre-computed. Nothing is fetched live; what you see reflects the dataset at the date shown on the home page.
Entities are deduplicated by name, and their types (artist, company, festival, and so on) were assigned by a bulk classification exercise that reduced unclassified entities from over 3,000 to a small residual.
| Mentions | The number of events an entity appears in. One newsletter headline can mention several entities. |
| Quarterly counts | Events per calendar quarter, from Q1 2018 to the latest data quarter. 2017 is excluded as a partial year. |
| Momentum score | The average of the last four quarters of mentions divided by the average of all prior quarters. Above 1.3 reads as accelerating; below 0.7 as decelerating. The Momentum Index recalculates this for the selected time window. |
| Temperature (Pulse) | A weighted weekly score: business deals and legal events count triple; venue openings, venue closings and funding events count double; everything else once. Normalised so the busiest week is 100%. |
| Net change (venues) | Openings minus closings, by year or city. |
| Co-entities | Other entities appearing in the same events, ranked by how many events they share. |
Genre assignments come from three sources: Chartmetric artist lookups matched against a master store; language-model classification of labels, clubs, and festivals using the weekly email context; and explicit genre mentions in story text.
Events inherit genres from the entities they contain. An explicit mention in the story takes precedence over an inherited entity genre. A story can carry up to three genres, but every chart on the Genres page counts each story exactly once, under its primary genre, so shares sum to 100%. Genre is currently resolved for 65.6% of stories. Industry-wide covers business and platform stories for which there is no meaningful genre to assign; among stories that have a genre to resolve, resolution is above 95%.
Genre filters also connect the Momentum, Pulse, Deals, Sources, entity search, entity detail and comparison views across the site.
| Artist (3,941) | DJs, producers, and performers mentioned in industry news |
| Company (2,229) | Technology platforms, promoters, agencies, manufacturers, and service providers |
| Festival (1,144) | Music festivals, conference events, and recurring gatherings |
| Club (919) | Nightclubs, venues, and event spaces |
| Person (937) | Industry executives, journalists, and public figures who are not performing artists |
| Product (920) | Software, hardware, and services for music creation and distribution |
| Label (706) | Record labels and music distributors |
| Unknown (46) | Ambiguous geographic references and unclassified terms |
Fifteen event categories, grouped by theme:
Editorial — feature, interview, release, chart position.
Business — business deal, partnership, funding, legal.
Venue — venue opening, venue closing, venue event.
Community — festival lineup, tour announcement, award, death.
Single editorial lens. Everything here is extracted from one publication. It reflects the IMS team's editorial choices, not the full industry, and coverage skews toward established Western markets.
2023 data gap. Only 1,118 events were extracted from 2023 newsletters, well below the normal annual volume. Dips in 2023 time series should be read with that in mind.
Partial current year. Coverage runs to the date shown on the home page, so the latest quarters are incomplete.
Limited location data. Roughly 8% of events carry location metadata, which is why there are no geographic visualisations.