So Motley Crue are back, four years after what was intended to be their final show, and after literally exploding the heck out of a contract that precluded them from ever playing together again. And why wouldn’t they? As their manager Allen Kovac says in a new interview with Forbes, demand for the band is through the roof after the success of their Netflix film The Dirt. “There’s a demand that we could see from data and streaming, where the audience changed and the streaming went up 600% when the film was out and has stayed up 300%, and will stay there because their followers tripled,” Kovac says in the interview. “And that’s what you’re aiming for. You’re aiming for followers. Not quick playlisting or radio airplay.”

Data showed Kovac and the band that their audience shifted from 64% aged 45-to-59, to 62% aged 18-to-45. And with the Motley Crue/Poison/Def Leppard tour selling over 700,000 tickets in the first weekend on sale, it shows that they’re on absolutely the right path. There’s demand there, and of course money to be made. And personally I’d love to see these three bands playing together just cos that sounds like a damn fun night out.

But there’s more to this story than just ‘band gets back together when it realises it can make a buttload of money.’ It’s also a great lesson for musicians in how you can use your social media and streaming statistics to figure out exactly where you’re wanted and by whom, and therefore how you might steer your career. What it doesn’t mean is that you should change who you are to chase an audience. But if you’re clever you can use that information to zero in on what you’re doing right and where it’s being best received. Maybe you’ll find you’re getting a lot of streams or social likes from a particular city. You could use this info to make a video just for that city and audience-target it on Facebook. Maybe it’ll get liked and shared a lot in that region and you’ll be able to build a real connection with that audience. Did someone share your video to a particular Facebook group and it got a great response? Well you’d better join that group! Do people respond better to your Instagram stories than to your posts? Well then, that tells you that you should consider doing things that monetise your stories (eg: swipe up to buy this song on Bandcamp!), but also that maybe you need to put more thought into posting the kind of things that connect with the Instagram users who don’t tend to look at the Stories section.

So next time you hit that stats tab, keep an open mind about what it’s telling you, what it could mean and how you could use it to bring your music to more people.