What I've Learned From Music Fans
The Superfan is the latest answer to the music industry’s prayers. But the current approach to serving those fans is failing them. Why?
I recently wrote a LinkedIn post about how the industry is paying a ton of lip service about the superfan while managing to do very little for this extremely important cohort of music listeners. And while calling BS on the machinations of the music biz is plainly one of my top/most annoying skills, it doesn’t offer much insight beyond, ‘we’re doing it wrong.’
So I thought I’d expand on some of the valuable lessons I’ve learned building products for music fans. My hope is that these examples spur conversation and provoke opinions rather than provide crisp answers to the issues.
So up first:
Why Is It So Damn Hard To Be a Fan?
Or
The Fan OS Is Broken
Let’s start with the indisputable fact: being a fan of a band is a tough enterprise. The way we have built the products forces a fan to use as few as four or as many as eight separate services to keep up with their favorite artist. Want to listen? Pick your service: is it Spotify, maybe Soundcloud, perhaps Apple Music or Tidal. Maybe it’s a Pandora channel or if there’s an exclusive, it could be somewhere else.
Already this is challenging, but then layer on an artist’s social channels for artist updates: Insta, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, X, etc. If you’re hunting down tour dates, merch or physical music, those all can be on separate services as well, including the artist’s own website. It’s a lot to start with. I’ve been hearing this complaint directly from fans way back in the Rhapsody era, in the early aughts. And since then, the problem has only gotten worse with more platforms creating many more walled gardens and separate apps.
Realistically that’s just the way the industry is and there will never be a one-stop shop for fans. I get that, but why do these platforms act like the others don’t even exist? Each platform has its own goals, and they function without thinking that fan will use another service. Worse they’re often openly hostile to a fan’s intent and desire. I would suggest that the impact on the fan is greater than we consider when designing platforms. Beyond do no harm, we are adding additional effort onto the fan experience. If you’re wondering why we have so many browsers and abandoned carts, I would suggest that this cost is part of the problem.
Failing Intent
The good news is that there has been some progress in fixing this broken fan experience. When Gimme Radio was in Techstars Music, the startup that sat next to us was Seated—David McKay’s ticketing company. David’s contention was that the artist should be in the center of their live experience and not reliant upon deals to dictate the features and functionality of each platform. His evidence was clear. He would demo a major label artist’s own website. When he clicked on a ‘Get Tickets’ link, he was sent to a landing page for one of those tour date aggregators that did a deal with the label to be main ticketing provider. Consider this from the fan’s perspective:
They have strong interest for the artist (evidenced by going to the artist’s site)
They show strong interest to seeing if the artist is on tour (evidenced by going to the tour section of the site)
They have strong intent to buy a ticket (evidenced by clicking on the Get Tickets button)
We fail the artist and the fan by selling all that intent down the drain by making the fan start over (again) with another service.
I remember getting very angry after seeing David’s demo. One of the hardest things to do in any business is to determine consumer intent. Here, we had the clearest possible evidence that the fan wanted to spend money on music. And we were building experiences that fought this intent for some stupid business development deal. By highlighting and solving this frustrating problem, David’s company found success in ticketing and the company was acquired in 2021 by Sofar Sounds.
It's just not ticketing. Nearly every service is designed to accomplish its own business goals without considering the fan. It’s understandable, but also makes fans just give up. Let’s get real and understand we’re always going to have separate platforms for different use cases and business models.
However it’s incumbent on all of us in the industry to figure out sensible ways that platforms work together to create cohesive experiences that don’t make the fan work harder. Let’s call this work building the Fan Operating System.
So how do we build this Fan OS?
What I’m suggesting is less of a plan of action but more a mind shift in the way we approach services and platforms. I think it’s really important to always consider and test new and current products with the fan’s perspective in mind. For bonus points, you can listen more intently to what fans are telling you. And if you want to go to the front of the class: actively reach out and do significant user testing and feedback before even considering features.
But overall it could be about approaching problems and possibilities with the fan’s mind set from the start. Case and point: NFTs. While at Gimme Radio, no other single development in the music business had as much heat as the non-fungible token craze from a couple years back. It’s pretty much all anyone could talk about as a new revenue source. We had our suspicions that it just didn’t hold sway for our users.
Instead of ripping up our roadmap and shoehorning in the ability to buy NFTs on the platform, we surveyed our users and found very little interest in the product (and quite a bit of hostility I might add). We heard some of our competitors were selling a lot of them, but we decided to sit out because we weren’t hearing from our fans that there was value in NFTs. In the end, we decided to validate whether there was anything to NFTs by offering them up to our fans. For free. The data we got back told us that even at the price point of zero it wasn’t enriching our fans’ music lives. Every metric from competition to interest to industry buzz to investor pressure wanted us to go hog wild with NFTs but without fan value? It wasn’t worth it.
Have a tough decision you’re trying to frame up in terms of fan value? Reach out and I’ll be happy to walk you through the process I’ve created to better determine value.
PS: You gotta check out David McKay’s post about a recent Noah Kahan show Seated ticketed. He’s doing great work!
Up Next:
Your Label (Mostly) Doesn’t Matter
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