The most recent episode of the Music Ally Focus podcast was a discussion of how music marketing is evolving, with a particular focus on serving fans and building communities.
The host, Music Ally managing editor Joe Sparrow, was joined by Aaron Bogucki, founder of direct-to-fan services company Big Cookie; Keziah Reed, digital marketing manager, artist services, UK at Believe; Robyn Elton, head of artist strategy (audience) at agency Blackstar; and Simon Scott, CEO of fan-engagement tech company Push Entertainment.
You can listen to the full podcast here, but some of the main talking points include:
Don’t ignore the small numbers
Within the music industry, there is a pressure to focus on the big numbers of social media and streaming. Marketing meetings can be dominated, still, by talk of hundreds of thousands (or millions) of views, likes and streams.
But does that mean the people in those meetings are put off talking about smaller numbers that might be more meaningful? Scott thought so.
“They’re not going, we got 10 people last week. We don’t know why, but they’re all from Birmingham,” he said. “That person[in the meeting] with 10 people in Birmingham, there’s something going on there, but it’s not really discussed: ‘Okay, 10, how do we make that 20 next week?’”
“One of the early lessons that I learned was to get from nought to 10 takes as much effort as 10 to 100, as much effort as 100 to 1,000, as much effort from 1,000 to 10,000,” continued Scott. “But the effort [in music] is spent from getting to a million to try and find the 1,000 [true fans] not from trying to find the 10 and get them up to the 1,000.”
This is not a complete shift away from the bigger metrics, which still have value. It’s just about giving other signifiers of momentum a bigger hearing.
“To me, the most important thing is comments,” suggested Elton. “If somebody takes the time and effort to comment their thoughts, that to me is worth a hundred thousand views. But… now in the back-end of social media platforms, analytics are all about views… It’s like: ‘Oh, you’ve got 700,000 views’ – which equates to one to three seconds on a video on a post these days!”
Later in the conversation, Bogucki talked about another metric in relation to Luvcat, an artist who he has worked on with client AWAL.
“Every time I go on Instagram, there’s like a new fan account popping up,” he said. “Three years ago, maybe people would care about it, but you wouldn’t really think that’s something we need to measure. But that’s a really tangible sign of sticky fandom.”
Scott would return to the theme of celebrating but then, crucially, also digging into the small numbers.
“Trust me, if you’re in Coca-Cola and you’re launching a new drink, everyone’s celebrating when they sell their first slab in the test market. They’re not going ‘Oh my god, we’ve just sold one slab of cans!’. They’re going ‘Right, why did they buy that? Let’s go and dig into it. Let’s go and understand what happened. Let’s go and replicate it’.”
It’s about rebalancing priorities. “So that you can go into a meeting and be like, 10 people in this pub bought this CD at a pop-up… And then somebody over there can say ‘We got four million views across short-form this month’. And they both equate to the same goal of success,” said Elton.
Give fans space to discover artists
Another key theme of the podcast episode was friction: that modern-day music fans are served up so much… stuff in their various feeds, they actively relish doing the detective work to find out more about the things they care about.
“For these fans and this generation, there’s no friction to finding new things. They’ve just been super served content at such a scale that finding friction is a good thing. They want to earn things. They want to feel like they’re experiencing something a bit more interesting than just being fed stuff,” said Bogucki.
“They want to explore. Give them some layers to dig into on your socials… websites and in other areas of your owned properties. Give them some things to explore, to uncover.”
Scott offered a similar view. “Probably if it’s too much of a massive thundering herd of content [that an artist is putting out] you’re probably going to turn off some of the people who like to be able to discover things themselves,” he said.
“70% of Gen Zs and 69% of millennials only trust a brand after carrying out their own research. So what does the music industry put out there for fans to go and carry out their own research? The fan ends up on Wikipedia… basically, because there’s nowhere else to go.”
“Gen Z and Gen Alpha are really seeking connection,” added Reed later. “They want to feel like they have built their own rapport with their favorite artists. And then that makes them go and do the extra research, check out the Wikipedia pages. They want to see who their favorite artist is on their own channels.”
Elton offered a fresh example of friction and discovery based on her work with Hayley Williams, who recently surprise-dropped a batch of new songs for fans – deliberately not as a traditional album.
“We’ve literally just had it with Hayley Williams and being in meetings with her where she’s like, ‘I’m going to drop 17 songs’. And everyone’s like, God, how do we put that on Spotify if it’s not an album, if it’s not a body of work?” said Elton.
“And then, do we do a Spotify Canvas for each one? ‘No, I don’t want to do Spotify Canvases’. Your best-practice brain is kind of blowing up a little bit. But then you’re like, oh yeah, actually, some of these things we just do because it’s common practice to do.”
“Positive friction in my mind absolutely has place and will continue to have place in music discovery. Fans crave challenge, it pulls them in. It rewards them mentally. Your brain kind of remembers those things that you worked to figure out and you worked to get to,” she continued.
Another example came with Nine Inch Nails, who were recently on tour ahead of the announcement of their soundtrack for Tron:Ares, including the lead track from it.
“As part of the merchandise, they had a lyric T-shirt and every three or four dates, the lyric on that T-shirt would change,” said Elton. “In the final four dates of the European tour, the lyrics were from the new upcoming Tron song. But we hadn’t told anyone that at all… We just dropped a message to the Discord mods who run a fan Discord.”
“We’ve spoken a lot about established artists but in this model, I think emerging artists can thrive because fans do want to find something early. They want to help an artist grow. They want to be a part of their journey,” she continued. “From Hayley Williams down to a completely unknown act, I think they can all play with positive friction, which will help build loyalty.”
Make fans feel seen and valued
Building fan communities is far from a new discipline for the music industry, but there is an overdue focus on what those fans actually want from them.
“Fundamentally it’s about making fans feel seen, in every way,” said Bogucki, who later returned to the theme. “They want to feel part of something. Not only artists, but like brands and causes… and they want to connect with each other. That’s what true community is about.”
And this is what creates true loyalty as well. “What we’re getting to here instead of action and sales, we’re getting to loyalty. Loyalty is the currency we’re dealing with now. And the more that you can foster that, the better long-term business you’re going to have,” he continued.
“You have to go back to the top, keep inspiring them, keep giving them things to explore, keep bringing community. And it’s a cycle. It doesn’t stop at a transaction… This is a long-term investment.”
Bogucki suggested that when the music industry thinks about eCRM (electronic customer relationship management) that too often it forgets the ‘R’ part of that – relationships. “We just treat these channels as transactional ATM-like experiences…”
A strong community can still create commercial opportunities. Bogucki cited White Lies, who relaunched their fanclub and as part of it formed a fantasy football league including band members and fans. This in turn sparked the launch of a branded football kit. “And it was the highest selling merch item of the year!”
Making fans feel seen and valued can also be about making them an extension of the team, whether they are Discord mods or running popular fan accounts on social media. The other benefit of which is to take the pressure of the artists themselves.
“It’s difficult. especially if perhaps you are an artist who is a bit more introverted, a bit more private, you’re not used to trying to share every element of your life and sort of commodify it, in a way to translate into engagement,” said Reed.
“Some artists are just naturally more private. They don’t want to share elements of their social lives or their personal lives with fans, but yet they still want to form that connection.”
“I think it’s important on our side of things to come up with strategies that still enable them to build that rapport, but that limit the artist’s participation so that they can still focus on their art… relying on things that aren’t just the artists having to put themselves out there is super important and becoming more important as time goes on.”
Elton also touched on this theme.
“If we build just artist-to-fan bridges, we’re going to have tired artists, one way conversations between the individual fan and artist, and everyone’s going to be running around like a headless chicken,” she said.
“Making sure that we’re building those fan-to-fan spaces takes the pressure off the artist and also allows the fan to do their own thing.”
Those own things don’t necessarily need to be tracked or owned, either. Elton cited the example of a popular subreddit about an artist run by fans, and the temptation for marketers to try to make it official and get the artist involved. “Sometimes we don’t need to own every single fan interaction…”
Rebalance your marketing funnel
One of the key themes of the conversation was a rebalancing of the traditional marketing funnel, rerouting some effort (and budget) away from the top – trying to reach as many people as possible on the biggest platforms – and towards the bottom: the most engaged fans.
Scott talked about a project his company worked on where they “noticed that most of the money was being spent trying to identify the fans from an audience, and not a lot of money was being spent on the fans, trying to get them to engage more… A top of the funnel approach: money was being spent on top of the funnel and not being spent on the bottom of the funnel.”
Bogucki also talked about being “stuck in the old marketing funnel” before citing research that Gen-Z listeners have broken that traditional mould, and so need new ways of thinking. Scott offered one during the podcast.
“Experiment with random acts of kindness,” he suggested. “If you’re going to go and spend a thousand pounds on digital marketing, take 500 pounds off it, and give the first 50 people who buy a t-shirt from the e-commerce store 10 pounds off.”
“Don’t advertise it. Don’t tell them about it. Don’t drive them to it. Just let them know: ‘Oh by the way, the artists are giving you 10 pounds off this. We really appreciate it. and see where that leads… And when you understand those patterns, take 10% of your top-of-the-funnel money and spend it at the bottom of the funnel.”
“Everyone talks about the ‘superfan dilemma’ but what they really mean is ‘How can we make more money out of D2C?’ That’s what they’re really saying,” he added.
“If that’s the case, the solution to the superfan dilemma is: find everyone who bought one thing last year and get them to buy two things this year… You wouldn’t start anywhere else. You’d start there.”
All of this means breaking out of some of the short-term KPIs (key performance indicators) that drive short-term thinking for campaigns: including chasing the algorithms in a constant battle to go viral.
“There is a bit of an obsession in marketing with short-term success and short-term growth, which I then think perpetuates that problem,” was how Elton put this.
“How do you find those fans that deeply care, and how can you convert audiences into those fans that deeply care, if you’re [always] running away with the next thing that you need to jump on, the next feature of the platform that’s been released, and so on?” she said.
The alternative is to “step back and pause for a minute, and be like, okay, passive discovery leads to passive fans.”
She stressed that those people have a place in every artist’s fanbase. It’s just that if too much focus is placed on them, the artist will be missing out on building the most meaningful relationships elsewhere.
“In this day and age, where everything is so instantaneous and the speed at which everything is moving generally – outside of music as well – I think we’re always looking for those big viral views on TikTok videos and those quick, easy successes: to be able to go to somebody and say hey, look how well this performed. It got 400,000 views when you normally get 20,000 views.”
But, as all four experts agreed, the quick wins are often not the things that help artists to create longer-term, truly meaningful – and sustainable for their career – relationships with the fans who love them.