  Many musicians, from up-and-comers to established artists, rely heavily on
performing live to promote and disseminate their music. To advertise live
shows, artists often use concert discovery platforms that make it easier for
their fans to track tour dates. In this paper, we ask whether digital traces of
live performances generated on those platforms can be used to understand career
trajectories of artists. First, we present a new dataset we constructed by
cross-referencing data from such platforms. We then demonstrate how this
dataset can be used to mine and predict important career milestones for the
musicians, such as signing by a major music label, or performing at a certain
venue. Finally, we perform a temporal analysis of the bipartite artist-venue
graph, and demonstrate that high centrality on this graph is correlated with
success.
