This year, the music portion of South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas runs from March 13-18. SXSW is one of the largest music festivals in the United States, with about 2,000 performers playing at more than 90 venues. With a focus on emerging talent, it’s hard to keep track of all of the new names and faces – so how do you know which acts you should keep an eye on in the coming months?

We turned to MusicMetric.com, a company that provides insights and understanding into online consumer behavior for the entertainment industry. They aggregate and analyze all music related information available on the web, tracking and indexing data for 600,000 artists and over 10 million individual releases — in real time. Their blog is full of fascinating data!

MusicMetric.com just released some interesting stats about SXSW — in the form of this amazing infographic — last week, which provides both a look back at last year’s fest to see which artists have made the biggest impact since, as well as information about artists to watch this year.

Here are a few takeaways from MusicMetric.com:

• Kimbra leads the field for fastest growing artists in 2012’s line up closely followed by the UK’s Ed Sheeran.
• Skrillex has seen the biggest online growth since his performance at last year’s SXSW with 5.4m new fans. Foster the People is in second place, but with only half of Skrillex’s growth.
• Gender of fans of artists playing at SXSW is almost an even split at 57% male 43% female.
• You’ll see that SXSW represents a range of genres from all over the world, with acts from Britain, Belgium, New Zealand and Canada taking the top spots for fastest growth and top web buzz.

For more info, head back to MusicMetric.com after SXSW to see their post-fest analysis at the end of March.

Tell us what you think: What artists do you think will make the biggest splash at SXSW?

The SongCast Crew