However, after 2020, his growth rate slowed down. It took two more years to accumulate an additional 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify, reaching around 4.3 million monthly listeners by the end of 2022.

While a hit record (with a hit remix) catapulted John to commercial success in 2020, his social media reach lagged behind. The growth John experienced on social media in 2020 occurred at a rate that was less than 10% of the rate of his streaming growth.

His average Instagram engagement grew about 7x during 2020 (compared to over 75x on Spotify!), from an average of about 600 likes per post to about 4,000.

One particular figure astounded us during this analysis: John Summit's social media engagement rate. According to experts, Instagram accounts with a like-to-follower ratio greater than 6% have a "very high engagement rate."

John Summit's engagement rate has consistently exceeded this threshold throughout the years, as far back as we could gather historical follower data.

Throughout 2022, John Summit maintained a like-to-follower ratio of at least 12% consistently. In 2023, he even reached a ratio as high as 15%!

Following his hit record in 2020, John consistently posted highly engaging social content over the next two years, resulting in a steady growth of his social following.

While John Summit had some successful records in 2021 and 2022 (most notably La Danza, released in March 2022), none of them achieved the same level of commercial success as the Deep End EP.

To be precise, he released 14 original tracks and remixes in 2021, followed by 10 releases in 2022, including others’ official remixes of his songs. Although he didn't have a major hit during this period, this consistent stream of releases helped maintain the momentum he gained in 2020. As a result, his streaming numbers experienced steady growth over these two years.

So, what has John Summit been up to this year? Well, it seems like he has finally found his second hit record. "Where You Are" feat. Hayla, released in March 2023 on his own label Off The Grid. It has achieved extraordinary success in the six months since its release and has already become John's 2nd most streamed release of all time.

Since its release, the song has continued to climb in popularity, reaching a rating of 80 on Spotify's popularity index and reaching over 80 million users through various playlists.

This signifies that playlist curators have been featuring "Where You Are" for months. Notably, a popularity rating of 80 is higher than any song by Fred Again.., Disclosure, or FISHER at the time of writing.

John Summit’s growth has been extraordinary, but how does he compare to other bigger electronic artists? From the beginning of 2021 onwards, his Spotify numbers have remained comparable to Australian sensation Rufus Du Sol.

Even though Rufus Du Sol has an entirely different model of releasing music—where they release an album every few years instead of constant singles—the band also has achieved steady growth in their streaming numbers.

John Summit maintained similar streaming numbers to Fred again.. until July 2022, when Fred again.. released ‘Turn On The Lights again..’ with Swedish House Mafia and Future. This catapulted his steaming numbers, once again demonstrating the power of having a hit record.

Illenium has stood in a class of his own, combining five albums and with a handful of singles over the years. While his releases have followed an album cycle, he has consistently released singles from the albums in order to maintain a consistent stream of releases.

In conclusion, John Summit's journey to success showcases the power of consistent output and dedication. By consistently releasing quality music and actively engaging with his audience on social media, he steadily built his fanbase and created opportunities for his music to be heard.

My sense is that we’ve only seen the beginning, and that many more hit records are on the way.

We performed data collection in June 2023, accessing data from the following sources:

• Soundstats: We manually collected data from the Soundstats web interface to support the majority of the findings in this article. We collected historical data on: Spotify monthly listeners, Spotify playlist reach, Spotify popularity, Instagram followers, TikTok videos, and Soundcloud monthly streams.

• Instagram: To our knowledge, there is no publicly available data source on historical Instagram engagement. Instead, we estimate Instagram engagement by randomly sampling three Instagram posts from the @johnsummit account for every month between October 2021 and June 2023. For each month, we take the average number of likes across the three posts as of June 21, 2023. 

There are two possible sources of bias in this procedure, both of which likely result in slightly overestimating the engagement rate. First, it is likely that we overestimate the engagement rate of older posts because they have been online longer than more recent posts and users have had more time to engage with them.

This assumes that a user is more likely to like a post that is a year old than they are to unlike a post that they liked a year ago. Second, it is also possible that we overestimate the engagement rate of newer posts due to bot activity.

New bots are likely interacting with new posts, inflating the engagement numbers of more recent posts. We presume that the bots which interacted with older posts are more likely to have been removed by Instagram, and likes originating from these accounts would also have been removed. 

• Songkick: We collected historical performance data from Songkick. We likely underestimate the total number of performances because Songkick does not index all performances from an artist.

• Beatstats: We collected historical Beatport chart positions.