This week I continued to explore the world of fans and fan data. I have divided this email into sections where the headlines are the TLDRs. While reading this, please listen to this track. You will understand why soon. Enjoy!
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There exist some pretty big paid-for-fan-clubs and membership platforms, both for big global acts and more local and niche ones.
Eric Church’s (Is the Drink In Your Hand?!) fan club has a yearly fee of $35 and 40,000 paying members, who receive T-shirts, access to VIP tickets, meet-and-greets and other exclusive items, which adds up to annual revenue of $1.4 million.
The Who charges $50-80 a year (three different tiers),
The National $50
Carrie Underwood $25
BTS Army costs $30; to enroll, fans have to sign up for the artist-to-fan communication app Weverse.
Neil Young also offers a key example of what this can look like. Young, whose well-known obsession with musical purity once led him to release an iPod competitor, built a website of his famously deep musical archives. Fans can access it in full by paying a modest subscription fee of $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year. This gives users access to his entire catalog in high-resolution audio form, as well as (during normal times) the ability to pre-order concert tickets, and discounts on album downloads.
Taylor Swift, for example, at one point created an app called The Swift Life
Ben Folds, whose fanbase dates back a quarter century, makes more than $100,000 per year from a Patreon page he operates to engage fans and as a way to offer livestreams—and more than 1,000 supporters pay Folds $10 a month for the honor.
Platform for building band membership websites exists. Both specific to music ( BandZoogle) and broader ones targeting all creators (Patreon, OnlyFans)
BandZoogle helps many musicians operate their membership sites, and has helped bands raise more than $5 million since the pandemic began. Bandcamp, a popular sales platform for indie artists, also launched a membership-style subscription service last year. Other platform players in this area are obviously Only Fans and Patreon
Utilizing fan data - Audigent is a prominent fan data mgmt platform
Audigent, a data management platform for entertainment, sports and lifestyle brands that helps reaching superfans. Audigent uses only first-party data from the artist’s owned and operated channels. Raised in Space invested in them from what I can tell.
Incentivizing fans to stream and then use the data to create new rewards
Unitea. share music, get rewards. an app that lets artists monetize the data generated by their superfans’ listening habits. Unitea syncs with users’ Spotify accounts, then rewards users who stream and share their favorite artists’ music with points called “Karma” (at the rate of 10 Karma per stream) that can be exchanged for artist merchandise and experiences sponsored by brands like AVID Pro Tools and Urban Decay. Artists can use their Unitea dashboard to access data about their superfans (such as age and geographic location), directly message those fans and create new rewards in just a few clicks.
Fan data is used frequently among labels to develop artist's careers and revenue
Fan data is used by labels to hype upcoming albums, inform features, sell data to brands and partners, and to sell merch and exclusive access.
Warner Music Group has a proprietary data management system, and in 2018 acquired the A&R insight tool Sodatone, which combines streaming, social and touring data to determine fan base loyalty, audience reactions to new releases and more. Sony Music Group’s Artist Portal offers a granular look at streams, video views, tags and shares of their music. And in November 2019, Universal Music Group launched its Universal Music Artists portal as part of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project to transform the company’s data and analytics structure.
Perhaps our target audience is not superfans, but instead more casual fans.
Superfans are highly engaged and are already well-monetized by the artist, management and label. Perhaps we are after less fanatic people (aka stans) that have a more casual emotional tie to a song. If so, our direction should continue to be less off "getting closer to the artist" and more about "what a song or a collection of songs says about you"