The attention economy taught music, sport and entertainment to count activity and call it progress. But a like is not fandom, a stream is not commitment, and engagement is often just observable noise.
JUDE, KANE, PICKFORD, HALL & OATES - AND THE STRANGE POWER OF PASSION
After England v Mexico, many of us on this side of the Atlantic woke up sleep-deprived, emotional and running on coffee. But World Cups do more than create drama, they reveal the many layers of passion. In sport, music and culture, the mistake is treating all fans as if they feel the same, behave the same, and need the same strategy. They don’t.
FAKE HYPE IS NOT FAN STRATEGY
THE GUARDIAN EXPOSED THE TACTIC. ARTISTS & MANAGERS NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE RISK.
The Guardian recently published a fascinating, uncomfortable and very useful article about fake fans, cynical viral campaigns and agencies “confecting social media buzz” around artists.
Artists and managers should read it carefully, not because it proves marketing exists. Fans know artists are marketed. They understand campaigns exist. They're not idiots. But the issue is more serious, because it’s when marketing starts pretending to be fan culture.
Fake fan pages
Seeded narratives
Paid creator activity dressed up as organic excitement
Artificial discourse designed to make an artist look more culturally inevitable than they really are.
And yes, you know what I’m going to say next…this is not fan strategy. No, this is artificially simulated momentum, a very weak foundation on which to build an artist career. But hey, the appeal, of course, is obvious.
It's relatively cheap
It's visible
It creates screenshots
It gives the label something to point at
It makes the campaign feel alive
The Guardian cited one package at around £1,490 per month with a nine-month minimum. In label budget terms, that is not huge, which is probably part of the problem. It’s cheap enough to buy without enough strategic scrutiny, and visible enough to create the comforting illusion that something is happening.
A senior label marketer recently described this type of activity to me as “a short-term sugar rush”. A spike of noise, the feeling of movement, some shiny screenshots…but then…it just dies away. Because nothing has really been built.
No deeper fan relationship
No owned audience
No strategic insight
No long-term growth engine
No greater understanding of why people care.
It’s just smoke-and-mirrors growth - a flash-in-the-pan solution that ‘games the system’ rather than builds anything solid underneath it. And that matters because artists do not need the illusion of momentum. They need authentic, solid and defensible organic growth, at scale.
AN INDUSTRY TRYING TO ENGINEER THE SYMPTOMS OF FAN MOMENTUM
A Spike of Noise is not the Same as a Fanbase.
The Guardian article is not just a story about one agency or one band. It is a warning about a much bigger industry weakness.
Record companies are under pressure. Their commercial model has changed. Experienced in-house marketing knowledge has thinned out. Teams are being asked to do more with less. Everyone needs proof that a campaign is moving. Everyone needs to show heat. So the industry defaults to cheap, visible, short-term solutions. I mean, I suppose it’s understandable, but understandable doesn’t mean strategically wise. Because the risk isn't shared equally.
The label can move on
The agency can move on
But the artist? Well, they carry the trust damage.
In almost all cases, the Fans are not going to feel betrayed by “the marketing department”. Nope, they’ll feel betrayed by the artist. They’ll question whether the excitement was real. Whether the fan accounts were real. Whether the conversation was real. Whether the success was earned or engineered.
a fake spike of attention, quickly plunges into a crash of disinterest.
It risks one of the few assets in music that cannot simply be bought back. Trust.
The issue is not influence. Influence matters. The issue is fake influence.
The issue is not creator marketing. Done well, creator marketing can be useful.
The issue is marketing pretending to be fan culture.
Because real fan culture is not just distribution. It is meaning, identity, belonging, credibility, advocacy and emotional ownership. When that gets faked, the damage can be disproportionate. What we have is an industry trying to engineer the symptoms of fan momentum without understanding the causes.
A fake fan account can post three times a day
A creator can be paid to use a track
A narrative can be seeded
A comment section can be nudged
But none of that answers the questions that actually build careers.
Who genuinely cares?
Why do they care?
What role does this artist play in their life?
What are the ‘artist truths’ that connect?
Which fans are emotionally invested, not just passively aware?
Which audiences are adjacent but reachable?
Who has the motivation and credibility to carry the artist into new communities?
Those are not a bunch of airy-fairy, tree-hugging questions, no, they’re solid commercial questions. Because trust, belief, identity, belonging and advocacy are the foundations to the value everyone eventually tries to take credit for, package up and monetise.
IF THE ANSWER IS F*** ALL, YOU HAVEN’T BUILT GROWTH. YOU’VE RENTED NOISE.
So, this is where artists and managers need to be careful, because the question isn't whether a tactic creates activity this week, but what remains when the activity stops. If the answer is f*** all, you haven’t built growth. You’ve rented noise.
How To Be More Efficient. How To Be More Effective..For Longer.
At Sound Effects, through the Superfan Engine, we approach the problem differently. The last thing we’re looking to do is 'game the system'. We are trying to help artists, managers, rights-holders and sports organisations build a better one.
Superfan Engine uniquely combines attitudinal fan insight, strategic foundation and tactical implementation. Not as separate exercises, but as one connected system: understand the fan, build the strategy, then activate real people and communities in ways that compound. Authentically.
Amazingly, it is not dramatically more expensive than some of these flash-in-the-pan solutions. But what it leaves behind is fundamentally different: reusable fan understanding, owned audience intelligence, two-way audience relationships, strategic clarity, authentic activation and a stronger foundation for future growth.
That is the point. In a future edition, we’ll come back to the uncomfortable truth that proper fan understanding costs more than cheap tactical noise. Of course it f*ing does, because it actually builds something of value!
And artist careers should not be built on shifting sands.
The future is not better fake virality. It is better fan truth.
If you’re an artist, manager or rights-holder trying to build real fan growth rather than rent short-term noise, let’s talk.
SPORT IS REPEATING MUSIC’S BIGGEST MISTAKE
port is drowning in data, but starving for understanding.
Football, rugby, cricket and other sports now have more dashboards, apps, platforms and fan engagement tools than ever before. But music learned the hard way that measuring more behaviour does not automatically mean understanding more about fans.
EMOTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE: The Real Asset Beneath Music and Sport Fandom
The next phase of growth in music and sport will not be built by organisations that simply collect more data, launch more apps or create more premium packages. It will be built by those who understand the emotional infrastructure already sitting beneath their audience: identity, memory, ritual, belonging and advocacy.
This article explores why fandom is not built on platforms, but on meaning.
WHAT DOES VIP ACTUALLY MEAN?
VIP should mean more than expensive access. In music and sport, too many “premium” experiences reward spending power rather than emotional value. But the most valuable fans are not always the richest. They are often the ones who carry the culture, bring others in, create advocacy and make the whole ecosystem stronger.
Where’s Your Bloody Strategy?
Too many organisations in music and sport are mistaking tactics for strategy.
Content calendars, fan apps, TikTok moments, CRM journeys and dashboards may all have a role to play. But none of them are strategy on their own.
Real strategy starts with understanding why people care, what role an artist, club or sport plays in their lives, and what is being built over time.
SUPERFANS ARE NOT A PRICING STRATEGY
There’s a phrase doing a lot of heavy lifting in music and sport at the moment: “Meet fans where they are.” Lovely sentiment. The problem is that, increasingly, it seems to mean: “How much more can we charge them?” Premium tiers. Dynamic pricing. VIP packages. Exclusive drops. Hospitality upgrades. Superfan monetisation.
Some of that has a place. But if your best fans only mean “charge more”, you’ve already missed the point. Superfans are not just high-yield customers.
They are the people who carry the story, create belief, bring others in, and make the thing feel bigger than the transaction. The latest Superfan Formula is live: Superfans Are Not a Pricing Strategy
THE END OF THE CAMPAIGN
Fans Don’t Live in Campaigns. So Why Do We Still Build Strategy Around Them?
There’s a strange little fiction sitting at the heart of music. And sport, come to think of it. It’s the idea that fans experience the things they love in the same neat little blocks the business uses to manage them, you know, album cycle, tour cycle, campaign window, new kit reveal, post-match content plan, anniversary campaign. All lovely and tidy and makes the spreadsheet purr.
But here’s the inconvenient bit. Fans don’t live in campaigns; they live in relationships.
And relationships, as anyone who has ever attempted one will know, do not politely begin on a Monday morning because someone in marketing has moved a box on a project plan from ‘pending’ to ‘live’. Relationships are messier than that. More emotional. More irrational. More continuous. More…human.
Which is slightly annoying if your entire business is still structured around short bursts of attention.
CAMPAIGNS END. FANDOM DOESN’T.
In music, we still talk about campaigns as if they are the natural unit of artist growth.
Single campaign
Album campaign
Catalogue campaign
Tour campaign
We throw everything at the moment. The content, the media spend, the influencer stuff, the playlist push, the TikToks, the pre-save link, the limited-edition thingy with the slightly different cover that somehow now counts as strategic innovation. Then the campaign ends and the team moves on, the budget closes, the dashboard gets screenshotted and everyone declares it either “solid” or “challenging”, depending on how emotionally honest the room is feeling.
And the fan? Well, the fan is still there. Possibly more interested. Possibly less. Possibly confused. Possibly ready to go deeper. Possibly one nudge away from becoming genuinely committed. But the system has moved on. That’s the problem.
Most marketing is designed around the campaign, but fandom is built in the gaps between them.
SPORT HAS THE SAME PROBLEM
Of course, Sport has its own version of the same madness. Clubs and organisations build around fixtures, seasons, memberships, renewals, tournaments, ticket releases and commercial windows.
Again, all understandable. These things matter. But a football supporter does not stop being a supporter when the final whistle goes. A rugby fan does not only care when the club needs them to renew. A cricket fan’s relationship with the game does not begin at the first ball and end when someone in a bucket hat gets sunburnt outside the beer tent. The emotional relationship is continuous.
It lives in family rituals
In WhatsApp groups
In pub arguments
In childhood memories
In inherited identity
In irrational hope
For some fans, the club or the sport is part of who they are. It sits inside their friendships, their sense of place, their sense of self. But I’m not saying anything that any of you don’t already understand. And yet so much sports marketing still treats fan engagement as something that happens around events - matchday engagement; content engagement; app engagement; ticketing engagement. All useful, but none sufficient, because the real question is not:
“How do we engage them around the next moment?”
It’s:
“What role does this club, team, artist or sport play in their life when nothing is being sold?”
That’s where the value is.
THE CAMPAIGN MINDSET IS TOO SMALL FOR MODERN FANDOM
The campaign mindset made more sense when attention was easier to gather. You had clear media windows. Clear release moments. Clear promotional cycles. Clear routes to market. A manageable number of channels. A functioning attention span across the general population. Ah…those were the days weren’t they Mr Marsh?
Now everything is always on. Every artist is a publisher. Every club is a content brand. Every fan is also a broadcaster, critic, creator, curator, meme distributor and occasional unpaid crisis-management consultant. In that world, a campaign is not enough, because a campaign is temporary.
But fandom compounds. Or at least it should.
Every interaction should make the relationship stronger
Every moment of participation should deepen the connection
Every fan action should teach you something useful
Every piece of understanding should make the next decision smarter
Instead, too many organisations keep starting from scratch with a new campaign, new brief, new “insight”, new panic. It’s the marketing equivalent of repeatedly building a tent in a storm and then acting surprised when it blows away.
FROM CAMPAIGNS TO ECOSYSTEMS
This is where the language needs to change. The future is not campaign-led. It is ecosystem-led.
That sounds a bit grand, I know. The sort of phrase that gets wheeled out by someone in expensive trainers at a conference in Cannes, but in this case, it actually means something simple. A fan ecosystem is the living network of ways people connect with an artist, club, sport, catalogue, team or cultural property. If you’ve forgotten or you’re new to the revolution, check out this past edition of the Superfan Formula to understand what we mean by fan eco-system.
Content. Live. Product. Community. Partnerships. Experiences. Identity. Memory. Ritual. Participation.
As we discussed in the past article, these things do not sit neatly in separate boxes, however much the industry enjoys pretending they do.
A boxset is not just product…
…it can be access, community, belonging and experience.
A football shirt and tour tee are not just merch…
…they’re identity, belonging and public declaration.
A cricket test match is not just a fixture…
…it’s ritual, place, identity, family, patience, connection, joy and occasionally deep personal suffering.
A tour is not just ticketing…
…it’s anticipation, pilgrimage, status, community and proof that you were there.
Fans experience all this as one connected emotional world, where the “business” too often experiences it as departments. That’s the gap.
WE KEEP OPTIMISING MOMENTS WHEN WE SHOULD BE BUILDING MEMORY
One of the reasons campaign thinking persists is because it is easy to measure - did the post perform? Did the email convert? Did the ticket link drive clicks? The pre-order work? Fine. Measure all of that. Nobody is suggesting we throw away the dashboards and make decisions by reading tea leaves in the back of a van. The issue is not measurement, the issue is mistaking measurement for meaning.
A campaign can tell you what happened during a defined period, but it rarely tells you what changed in the relationship. So did fans:
feel closer?
understand the artist better?
feel more involved?
bring others in?
become more likely to buy again, attend again, share again, defend again, care again?
That’s the stuff that matters. Because the real value of fandom is not just in the transaction, but in the memory, the identity and the future behaviour that the transaction creates.
RELEVANCE IS NOT A CAMPAIGN WINDOW
This is especially important for heritage artists, catalogue, established clubs and traditional sports. The lazy assumption is that relevance needs to be periodically relaunched via an anniversary, a reissue, retro shirt, legends dinner, influencer moment or maybe a pop-up if everyone’s feeling dangerously innovative.
But great artists do not matter because someone remembered to repackage them every five years.
And great clubs do not matter because someone sent a renewal email with “early bird” in the subject line. They matter because people continue to find meaning in them. Sometimes the original fan. Sometimes the lapsed fan and sometimes the 17-year-old discovering them for the first time and feeling that this supposedly “old” thing has just explained their entire personality better than anyone at school ever has.
FINAL THOUGHT
Campaigns are not going away. Nor should they. You still need launches, announcements, pushes, drops, renewals, fixtures, tours and all the other necessary bits of industry machinery. But they should be expressions of a deeper strategy, not substitutes for one. Because fans do not live in your campaign window. They live in their own world.
The job is to understand that world, understand the role you play within it, and then build something that keeps the relationship alive long after the campaign has ended. That is where the next phase of growth sits. Not in more noise, more content or another short-term spike dressed up as progress. Rather in continuity, participation, memory and meaning.
Campaigns end. Fandom doesn’t.
Next time, we’ll look at one of the biggest mistakes this shift has created: treating superfans as a pricing strategy, rather than the ignition point for growth.
Sound Effects helps rights-holders, artists and sports organisations understand, activate and grow fandom through insight, strategy and fan mobilisation.
I Loved Tin Machine, So I’m Clearly Not Objective
Last Wednesday I was very lucky to be invited to see the David Bowie You Are Not Alone show at the Lightroom in London.
Now…before I say anything else, I should probably admit two things. Firstly, over the years I’ve had the privilege of working with the Bowie Estate in different capacities. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I’ve been a completely obsessive Bowie fan for most of my life.
I mean…I loved Tin Machine.
I loved Never Let Me Down.
So let’s be honest, objectivity left the building a long time ago.
Which means I probably can’t offer a properly balanced critical review. So instead, in the fairest and most measured terms I can possibly muster, I’ll simply say this:
It was absolutely fucking amazing!
I laughed.
I cried.
At points it genuinely felt spiritual.
No…actually religious.
Not just because of the music, the imagery or the scale of it all — although all of those are extraordinary — but because it somehow manages to capture something deeper about Bowie himself:
the curiosity,
the humanity,
the constant reinvention,
the vulnerability,
the alienness,
the warmth.
It reminds you that Bowie wasn’t just a musician. He was a world people lived inside. And that’s probably why the experience hits so hard emotionally. I loved it so much that I took the family back again on Sunday.
If you have even the faintest connection to Bowie, music, art, imagination or simply the idea that culture can still make you feel something…go. Seriously!
Oh, and before anyone asks: No, I cannot get you free tickets.
Huge thank you to the very special people who made it possible. You know who you are.
#DavidBowie #Bowie #Lightroom #MusicCulture #ImmersiveExperience #MusicFans #MusicIndustry #Culture #Art #Creativity