Goldman Sachs. Citigroup. Barclays, all confidently modelled the future of music…and all completely wrong. Meanwhile, fans quietly built a billion-dollar resurgence right under their noses. A story proving that if you don’t understand fans…you won’t see what’s coming next. New edition of the Superfan Formula
The phrase “meet fans where they are” is thrown around a lot in the music industry, but rarely understood. This edition of The Superfan Formula explores what it really means, why tiered monetisation misses the point, and how to use attitudinal insight to scale emotional connection and build a fanbase that lasts.
Everyone’s talking about “super-serving superfans” but no one’s asking what’s the actual plan? Strategy isn’t slapping “digital” in front of a campaign—it’s understanding what your artist means to fans, and where they’re going long-term. If you’re still throwing spaghetti at TikTok and calling it a strategy, it’s time to read this.
A decade ago, we predicted how streaming would reshape music — and we were half-right. The industry embraced track-based strategy but ignored the need to build enduring artist brands. Now, labels lean on catalogue, artist development has stalled, and WHY data is more essential than ever. Time to rethink. #superfans
AI has never had its heart broken. That was Sting’s beautifully simple explanation for why AI-generated music may be technically competent without necessarily being meaningful.
It also points to a much bigger truth: when everything becomes easier to make, human meaning becomes more valuable.
New Superfan Formula: AI Can Create Content. It Can’t Create A Reason To Care.
YOUR NEXT FANS AREN’T IN YOUR CRM.
They haven’t bought anything.
They haven’t joined the mailing list.
They haven’t clicked, followed, registered or attended.
They may not even know that the artist is relevant to them yet.
That makes them invisible to almost every fan system the music business currently uses.
A CRM is immensely useful once somebody has entered the relationship. It cannot identify the people outside it, or explain what might bring them in.
If growth is the objective, that is a fairly significant blind spot. This edition of The Superfan Formula examines what CRM can do, what it cannot do and why finding future fans requires a different kind of insight.
Hold up, hold up!! We need to pause for the briefest of moments and think about something slightly nonsensical.
Music is among the most personal and powerful of all art forms. It soundtracks the highs and lows of human experience. Sport is much the same: the irrational adoration of a team seemingly incapable of winning.
Emotion. Identity. Memory. Belonging.
Yet the principal systems we use to profile the 'identifiable fan' cannot capture, analyse or explain the basis of that human connection.
They can connect every stream, click, purchase, ticket and interaction. Brilliant. Valuable. Technically impressive.
But the technology can connect the evidence. It cannot make the human meaning appear.
And if the person has never purchased, registered, attended, downloaded or joined? They are not an incomplete record. They are completely invisible.
Owning fan data matters. But possessing the record of someone’s behaviour is not the same as understanding the person.
The fan who spends most may not be the most passionate. The supporter who attends least may be making the greatest sacrifice. And some of your most influential advocates may barely appear in your database at all.
Article 47 of The Superfan Formula asks a deceptively simple question: what do you actually understand when you ‘own’ the fan data?
Labels may hold extraordinarily rich data about recorded-music consumption.
But can any single commercial partner develop an effective strategy for an artist ecosystem it neither controls nor sees in its entirety?
That isn’t a criticism of labels. It is a structural and commercial question about where responsibility for the whole artist strategy should sit.
My view? With artist management.
Spotify knew an extraordinary amount about how people used its service.
It could see who listened, what they listened to, when and where they listened, what device they used, which tracks they skipped, which features they explored and who moved from Spotify Free to Premium.
If any company should have been able to find the answer within its behavioural data, surely it was Spotify. Surely.
Except the answer wasn’t there.
During my time at EMI and Warner Music, we worked closely with Spotify to understand the motivations, perceptions and emotions of different tribes of music fans across ten countries.
In our research at the time, nearly half of Spotify Free users thought Premium had limitations that simply did not exist. Perhaps even more remarkably, around a quarter of existing Premium subscribers didn’t know that features they wanted were already available to them.
Spotify could see the behaviour.
It could not see the misunderstanding behind it.
The behaviour was visible. The barrier was not.
I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the slide in your presentation labelled “Insights” probably doesn’t contain any.
Streams increased by 14%. Frequent match attendees buy more replica shirts. Vinyl buyers spend more on concert tickets.
These may be useful observations, patterns or correlations. But they do not necessarily explain why anything happened. And without the human explanation, we may be measuring activity while completely misunderstanding the person.
This atricle: why data, evidence and insight are not interchangeable and why knowing what fans did yesterday is not enough to create growth tomorrow.
You Keep Using the Word “Insight”…
There’s a growing consensus across music - and increasingly sport - that we need to build stronger, more direct relationships with fans. I agree completely, but we also need to be much more precise about what we mean.
An audience is not automatically a community.
A database is not automatically an owned relationship.
A group of highly engaged consumers is not automatically a fan strategy.
And calling something a community does not make it one.
Not every fan wants the same relationship. Some want access. Some want recognition. Some want to participate, create or advocate. Some simply want to listen, attend and remain quietly loyal for decades.
That does not make them less passionate. Although many of the engagement metrics we use to judge fandom would suggest otherwise.
This week’s edition of The Superfan Formula distinguishes between six things that are related - but absolutely not interchangeable.
Has artist management accidentally been reduced to project management? The manager spends the day responding, approving, forwarding and chasing. Busy? Absolutely. Strategic? Not necessarily.
Somebody must optimise for the artist’s whole career, not simply the stream, ticket or T-shirt in isolation. That responsibility belongs to the manager.
The next ownership battle in music won’t be over masters. It will be over understanding. Artists have spent decades fighting to own their recordings, publishing, image rights and merchandise. But as audience insight, fan intelligence, AI and predictive analytics become more valuable, another question is becoming increasingly important: Who owns understanding of the fan? Labels, streaming services, promoters, ticketing companies and merchandise partners can all contribute valuable information. But each sees the fan through its own commercial lens. Only management sees the whole career and the complete fan ecosystem. This is not about weakening commercial partners. Management-owned understanding should make every partnership, brief, campaign and investment decision better. Article 41 of The Superfan Formula: Who Owns Your Fans? Because once someone else owns understanding of your audience, they begin influencing the decisions that shape your future. Who owns the strategic picture in most artist businesses today?
