Be honest, we’ve all been guilty of worshipping at the altar of “the dashboard.” You know the one full of numbers, graphs, and impressive little arrows pointing up. The problem is none of it tells you why any of its happening.

Expensive Fan-engagement Platforms, Instagram Insights, CRM dashboards, Spotify for Artists, they’re all just mirrors. They reflect what your fans did yesterday, not why they’ll do anything tomorrow.

“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”

And it’s not just music. Sport is drowning in the same sea of shiny metrics. Clubs obsess over season ticket renewals, engagement rates, shirt sales, app logins, but none of that explains why a fan renews, travels 200 miles on a wet Wednesday, or still believes in the club when it’s sitting 19th in the table.

The sports world is riddled with “fan engagement” platforms that promise transformation but deliver little more than tidy dashboards. They count behaviours, they don’t decode belief. They know how many fans turned up, but not why they still care. The irony is most of these shiny platforms just ingest the same data you already have and feed it back in a glossy dashboard. No human context, no forward view and that’s because they’re built by technologists, not people who actually understand fans or passion.

And that, dear reader, is the problem with transactional data. It’s rear-view-mirror stuff, passive, hollow, and utterly blind to what’s coming next. Clicks, streams, opens, likes, tickets, merch, all lovely to chart in a meeting, but all useless for actually building the future. You can’t build strategy from numbers alone. You can only react.

So, What Is Attitudinal Insight?

Attitudinal insight is the human layer underneath the data, the beliefs, motivations, values and emotional triggers that drive behaviour. The Why!

It’s the difference between knowing a fan bought a boxset and knowing they bought it because it makes them feel closer to who they were at 17. But more, it’s about understanding how they use the boxset, find out about the boxset, perceive the ‘concept’ of the boxset, what they feel is missing from that concept. Or knowing a supporter renewed their season ticket not because of a winning streak, but because the club represents family, ritual, and belonging. And which of those is the most powerful.

That emotional layer, the why, is what predicts future value. It tells you which fans will evangelise, which will pay more, which will follow you into new ventures, and which couldn’t care less.

The Data Doesn’t Lie; It Just Doesn’t Speak Human

Take an example. In 2023, a major label analysed 2 million Spotify users and discovered that less than 2% of listeners accounted for over 40% of total streaming volume. Transactionally, that’s gold. But why are those superfans streaming that much?

When we ran attitudinal segmentation on the same fan base, we found two distinct emotional drivers:

Identity Builders: fans for whom the artist represents self-expression and belonging. Music’s actually 2nd!
Musical Archivists: completists who value rarity, ownership, and scholarship.

I’m simplifying the study for the benefit of brevity, but both stream heavily. The same behaviour, two completely different motivations.

And in sport, it’s exactly the same story. Clubs can have two fans sitting side by side in the same stand, one is there because it’s family tradition, the other because they’re obsessed with stats, tactics and transfer gossip. Transactionally identical; attitudinally worlds apart.

Look, these are fairly straightforward, elementary examples (I mean, bleeding obvious), but their rudimentary nature is to get the point over. And to be honest, I ain’t gonna share game changing insight for free mate. But you get the point, fans aren’t alike, they have different needs. Knowing why shapes everything - creative, messaging, positioning, product, innovation, blah, blah, blah. Transactional data doesn’t do that. It just keeps the CFO happy and fuels an ever-decreasing circle of behaviour, delivering diminishing returns.

“…AN ENVIRONMENT, A LIVING COMMUNITY, WHERE FANS CAN SHOW YOU WHAT THEY FEEL…”

How the Superfan Engine Finds the “Why”

At Sound Effects, our currency is attitudinal insight, when you understand that you can engineer growth deliberately, not by luck. What makes our tool the Superfan Engine unique is its ability to do two things most companies separate, it captures deep emotional insight and turns it into action…fast. It’s built to reveal why fans care, and then channel that energy into strategy, creativity, and growth…fast.

The Superfan Engine goes beyond dashboards and surveys. It listens, decodes, and translates emotion into direction. It reveals what truly drives passion - the rituals, values, and beliefs that make someone belong - and then turns that understanding into momentum.

It does this by creating an environment, a living community, where fans can show you what they feel, not just tell you. A space where emotion, behaviour, and creativity collide, producing the kind of understanding that fuels both strategy and story.

It’s not tech for tech’s sake. It’s a bridge between emotion and execution, and that’s where the growth lives.

Attitudinal Insight in Action

Appling the Superfan Engine to an artist project discovered that some “vinyl collector” audiences weren’t driven by audio fidelity at all. We saw among some younger vinyl buyers, the motivation was often ownership and display - the need to physically show identity and taste. They didn’t even own a turntable. But for others, it wasn’t about showing off at all, it was about ritual. The deliberate act of dropping the needle, sitting still, and making listening sacred again. Interestingly it also revealed that the physical elements of sleeve, sleeve notes, imagery etc were part of that ritual. Unsurprising? Yeah, but we also saw they were these physical elements where part of the listening process, when streaming the music too. Transactional data, vanity metrics will never reveal insights like these.

These insights don’t just feed strategy, they fire it. They don’t just shape the type of products we make, as we’ve talked about in the past they highlight a missed commercial opportunity of introducing theatre, immersion and narrative to how we create physical products, even the story of their manufacture. And that’s something no record company is doing.

The opportunity? Craft content, partnerships, and experiences that speak to each group differently.

That’s when engagement stops being generic and starts becoming human.

Why It Matters

Transactional data will tell you what’s happening. Attitudinal insight tells you what to do about it.

And in industries drowning in dashboards and starved of meaning, the Superfan Engine is how you reclaim control. It’s how you build strategy that moves people, not just metrics.

Because superfans, whether of a band or a club, don’t think in KPIs. They think in emotion, identity, and belonging. And if you can understand that, you can build almost anything.