The music industry - and increasingly sport - is finally recognising that relationships matter. Now we need to be much more precise about what that actually means.
If you’ve been paying attention over the past three weeks, you’d hopefully have clocked a larger theme, arguing what artists and managers must own. So far, we explored:
Fan understanding
Strategy
Direction of the entire Fan Ecosystem
This week, I want to add a fourth - "Clarity".
That clarity matters because the music industry is finally waking up to the importance of fan relationships, and that is undoubtedly a good thing.
George Ergatoudis, formerly of BBC Radio 1, Spotify and Apple Music, recently wrote an excellent piece in The Sound Hack arguing that some of the smartest emerging artists are building communities and genuine human relationships rather than endlessly chasing streams, playlists and algorithms. Of course, I agree with that direction completely, it’s something that we’ve been urging the artist community to embrace for years now. But, at the same time, I also think we need to be careful, because “community” is rapidly becoming yet another music-industry catch-all buzzword: a word used to describe almost any group of people who have shown some form of interest in an artist. But look, people:
An email list is not automatically a relationship
A Discord server is not automatically a community
A group of highly engaged consumers is not automatically a fan strategy
And calling something a community does not make it one.
So, we’ve got to distinguish between six very different things.
Six Different Things, Not Six Different Names for the Same Thing
Reach: the number of people who might encounter you.
An audience: the group of people who pay some attention.
A database: a group of identifiable people you have permission to contact.
An owned relationship: exists when the artist has a direct route to those people, rather than relying entirely on an intermediary.
A community: exists when people develop relationships not only with the artist, but with one another.
A fan strategy: determines how all of those things should work together.
They’re related, but they’re not interchangeable.
You can have enormous reach and very little relationship, and you can have millions of monthly listeners and almost no meaningful understanding of who those people are.
You can have 100,000 email addresses and communicate with every one of them in exactly the same generic way – which, and let’s be brutally honest here people - for 90% of you reading this newsletter means sending 12 emails a year… almost always with nothing more than a ‘buy’ message.
You can have thousands of people in a Discord server who never speak, participate or return.
And you can have a small, intensely connected group of fans who are hugely valuable culturally, creatively and commercially, but still represent only one part of the wider fanbase.
“So what?”, I hear some contend. Well, it’s simple, not every fan wants the same relationship with an artist or a club, or a sport for that matter.
Fan Behaviour, Ain't One Behaviour
Some people want proximity to the artist; others want proximity to one another.
Some want access. Some want recognition.
Some want to participate, create, advocate and recruit.
Some simply want to listen to the music privately and be left alone, which doesn’t necessarily make them less passionate – although almost all the metrics that you’re pawing over on your fan-engagement platform that you’re using to judge fandom, would say otherwise.
The Visible Fan and the Invisible Fan
A fan who never comments, posts or joins a Discord might still buy every album, attend every tour and introduce the artist to everyone they know. But another might never buy a physical product but create videos, memes or conversations that introduce the artist to thousands of other people.
So, one fan may express their relationship commercially, but another expresses it socially, another culturally, another creatively and another privately.
Fandom is not one behaviour. And passion is not one thing. That's the important shit, and it’s why the strategic starting point cannot simply be: “How do we build a community?”
Human Questions, Not Platform Questions
The starting point must be: “Why do different people care?”
What emotional role does the artist play in their lives?
How does their fandom allow them to express themselves?
What cultural world does the artist give them access to, or do they place the artist within?
What do they want from the relationship?
And what might motivate them to deepen it?
These are not platform questions. They are human questions, that can’t be guessed or formulated on a hunch.
For years, our work has been grounded in the core ingredient within music and sport - fan motivation: understanding the emotional, psychological and cultural reasons different groups of people connect with an artist.
Because behaviour (what someone buys, streams, clicks, likes) tells you what happened. Whereas motivation helps you unpick why they behave in a certain way and what might happen in the future. And that's pure gold!
It helps explain why one person will attend a show, why another will (or won’t) buy an expensive product. What makes some create content and others persuade five friends to listen. It allows management to stop treating the entire fanbase as one undifferentiated mass.
"...objective is not to force every fan into the same community."
Amazingly, the objective is not to force every fan into the same community. It’s to understand the different relationships that already exist and create relevant opportunities for each of them to deepen, participate or contribute. At the risk of repeating myself, yet again, some fans might want membership and belonging. Some want exclusivity, creative involvement, knowledge, status or access. Some might become advocates who influence entirely new audiences. Some might mobilise quickly around a release, tour, cause or cultural moment. And some might remain quietly loyal for decades.
From Collecting Fans to Mobilising Them
A real fan strategy recognises all of them and their nuances. It identifies which groups matter for which objectives, understanding what might motivate each group. Then it designs different forms of relationship and participation. And it connects those relationships across the wider Fan Ecosystem: recorded music, live, experiential, product, content, partnerships, direct-to-fan and whatever comes next.
This is the difference between collecting fans and mobilising them.
A mailing list gives you contact details. But fan understanding tells you what matters to the people on it.
A community creates connection, but a fan strategy gives that connection purpose and direction.
A mobilised fan ecosystem allows different people to contribute in different ways - listening, attending, buying, creating, sharing, advocating, influencing and bringing others with them. That is much more powerful than simply increasing the number of people sitting inside a platform. Because the objective is not to collect the most email addresses or generate another impressive engagement metric on your dashboard.
The objective is to build a coherent system of relationships that creates value for the artist and the fan over time.
building more direct human relationships
So yes, the industry should stop obsessing over rented attention and begin building more direct human relationships, but we should not allow “community” to become another fashionable word that disguises the absence of strategy.
Look, an audience can be reached. A database can be contacted. A relationship can be deepened. A community can connect. But only a fan strategy determines why, where and how those things should happen.
The future will not belong simply to the artists or clubs with the biggest audiences. Or even the largest communities. It will belong to the artists, managers, clubs and rights-holders who understand the different reasons people care, and know how to turn that understanding into a connected, owned and mobilised Fan Ecosystem.