Built by Chad Hillard
Founded Hillydilly in 2007. Credited with discovering Billie Eilish. Early to Lorde, Halsey, Daniel Caesar, and LANY. Shut the blog down in 2020. Now runs Dreams Never Die and Before The Data.
An AI agent scouts TikTok 24/7. Chad filters it by hand. You get the artists worth hearing, with daily data, before anyone else is watching.
What actually happens between a TikTok post and an artist showing up on your dashboard.
An agent scans hundreds of hashtags, 24 hours a day, flagging unsigned artists with real early signal. While you're asleep, it's working.
Most get cut. The ones with real voice, songwriting, and momentum move to the shortlist. 19 years of A&R instinct calibrates this step.
Approved artists hit your dashboard with daily streams, UGC, and social score. Spike alerts come to your inbox. Closing is on you.
Every number updates daily at 5pm after store turns. Click any metric in the live dashboard to drill deeper.
01 Proprietary Social Score · 02 Daily stream velocity · 03 UGC intelligence
Chartmetric, Soundcharts, and Viberate are research tools, you still have to find the artists yourself. Before The Data does the filtering first.
| Before The Data | Chartmetric | Soundcharts | Viberate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Human curation | ✓ | , | , | , |
| 24/7 AI scouting layer | ✓ | , | , | , |
| Daily data refresh | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | , |
| Pre-release artist access | ✓ | , | , | , |
| Proprietary social score | ✓ | , | , | , |
| Price | $49/mo | $116/mo | $129/mo | $19/mo |
Eight bullet points is a list. Three is a pitch.
Every artist on the dashboard has been heard, vetted, and approved. The noise is gone before you arrive.
While you're asleep, the agent is scanning TikTok for the next Billie. By morning, new finds are in the queue waiting to be filtered.
A proprietary 0–100 number updated daily, built from posting frequency and consistency across TikTok and Instagram.
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Cancel before day 8 and you're not charged. No hoops.
Programmatic access to the scouting intelligence, real-time artist metrics, spike alerts, and signing detection, direct into your workflow. Built for labels, management companies, and platforms that need to move faster than everyone else.
View API documentation →Before The Data is an AI-powered A&R scouting dashboard built by Chad Hillard, founder of Hillydilly. It tracks Spotify streams, TikTok UGC, Instagram followers, and social score for unsigned artists Chad is watching. Members get the live scouting dashboard, data spike alerts, weekly tracker email, and every new artist add before it goes anywhere else.
Chartmetric and Spotify for Artists are research tools. You go looking for artists. Before The Data does the filtering first. Chad listens to thousands of songs, applies 19 years of A&R instinct, and only adds artists that have a real shot. You get the shortlist, not the firehose.
Spotify streams and daily velocity, TikTok UGC count, Instagram followers and post consistency, proprietary Social Score (0-100 updated daily), song-level breakdowns, 14-day trend charts, and spike alerts when an artist crosses a threshold.
The Social Score is a proprietary 0-100 number we calculate daily for every artist on the dashboard. It factors in TikTok posting frequency, Instagram posting frequency, and consistency over time. It's designed to show you which artists are actively building, not just who had one viral moment.
Before The Data is $49.99/month with a 7-day free trial. Cancel any time before day 8 and you won't be charged.
Yes. Cancel from your account settings at any time. If you cancel during the 7-day trial, you're not charged. No hoops, no questions.
A&R reps, managers, music supervisors, sync licensing teams, indie label scouts, and anyone whose job is finding artists before they cost a fortune to sign. If you're still using playlists and algorithms as your only discovery tool, this is the upgrade.
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New artists, data signals, what Chad is watching. Free. No credit card.