The State of Revealed Recordings in 2021

Revealed Recordings has built its name as one of the premier sources of festival music due to the far-reaching influence of Hardwell and a steady roster of high caliber talent such as KAAZE, Maddix, SICK INDIVIDUALS and many others. While it was once known for its top-tier big room and progressive house releases, these days you’re more likely to find bass house and future house and some fairly regular pushback from longtime fans on the direction of the label. Today we wanted to take a look into the business side of Revealed Recordings and see if whether or not this new direction in sound has paid off.

For the scope of this piece, we’ve pulled the YouTube and Spotify numbers of all of the releases on the main label of Revealed Recording and its biggest sublabel, Revealed Radar over the course of January 1, 2021 to September 11, 2021 to get a large sampling of their recent offerings. The separation of which genre each release fell under can be found in the full spreadsheet which can be found at the bottom of the article and was based on genre-markers and subjective opinion. 

One important factor is that Revealed Recordings leverages Hardwell’s nearly 3.5 million Spotify followers through the use of compilations such as these which usually give one release a week a huge bump from Hardwell’s release radar. These bumps tend to go to Revealed’s main roster which you can find on their SoundCloud banner and include KAAZE, SICK INDIVIDUALS, Maddix, Dr. Phunk, Ryos, Dastic, but they’ve also apparently had success promoting other big talents such as Dash Berlin and Plastik Funk with this feature. Despite this added advantage, the numbers paint a very clear picture about what has performed well for the label. 

Average and Median Stream Values per Genre on Revealed Recordings Main

It should be unsurprising to learn that Big Room and Progressive House account for 49.4% of all of Revealed Main’s streams on Spotify and make up 39.4% of the total releases. Bass house and future house, arguably the releases that fans take the most issue with, constitute 43.4% of the label’s releases but only 21% of the total Spotify streams. On average, you’ll find that Big Room releases net 553,689 streams per release and progressive gets 498,324 streams. Bass House on the other hand gets an average of only 144,816 streams, barely one-fifth of Big Room or Progressive. It’s worth noting that the median values show a less extreme discrepancy with Bass House at 107,549, Future House with 206,322, Big Room putting up 202,062 and Progressive leading the pack at 614,753. It’s hard to find justification for Revealed’s continued insistence on signing a genre which brings only a fractional amount of streams of the genre they were once known for. ​

Streams per Genre on Revealed Radar

Pivoting over to Revealed Radar, the skew on releases is even greater. In 2021, 4 out of 5 tracks is either bass house or future house. For the past two years, many have assumed this is just a changing trend and that Revealed has been giving Spotify listeners what they want. However this seems to be far from the truth with the average Bass House release on Radar receiving 42,042 streams and Future House releases getting 36,618. For the mere six Big Room releases on Radar, they have averaged 53,882 streams and Progressive House goes beyond that at 59,303 streams with their sixteen releases. Despite artists like DJ St3v3 buying outside promotion from labels like Actuation to boost their radar performance, the numbers still clearly indicate a fan and listener preference to Big Room and Progressive. 

Furthering convoluting the issue is the Spotify playlists that Revealed manages. You would think that over the two years that they've been pushing bass house, they would have worked to grow their bass house lists. However their two main lists, "Bass House Club 2021" and "Workout Power" have a collective 94,826 followers whereas the "Progressive Festival Hits 2021" list has 81,186 and their biggest one, "Big Room  EDM 2021 | Bella Ciao" has a whopping 190,049 and sits atop the search results for anyone looking for "Big Room" on Spotify. Considering they're actively spending money on growing all of these lists and the lists for big room and progressive get far more traffic than the bass house and workout lists, you'd think they'd be filling their discography with more tracks they could place atop these lists and collect the revenue from it. 

To boil it all down, it seems to be a case of the people versus the A&R. Resoundingly the fans and listeners want more Big Room and Progressive from Revealed but their team is insistent on putting out Bass House and Future House that no one has been asking for. They have had over two years to rebrand the label and find a balance between catering to existing fans while also expanding and evolving the sound of the label. 

We hope that by providing this information, you have a better understanding of what has been going on behind the scenes of Hardwell's Revealed Recordings. There are so many deserving talents that could be bringing them streams, revenue, and social credibility but instead they have opted to push their own narrative that bass and future house is what the listeners want when the numbers indicate quite the opposite. You can view all of the data we collected for this piece here. ​