How to build a truly “fan-centric” online music experience

By: Jeremie Joubert

Published: 2020-11-04

In an interview with IQ Magazine in December 2019, UTA’s global head of touring Neil Warnock shared what he foresaw to be an enduring challenge for live concerts: “To ensure artists give value for money to customers, and to ensure that the fan experience is outstanding so that a customer will want to come back and see that artist for another show” (emphasis added).

Fast-forward nearly one year later, and live concerts have faced a much more pressing challenge: Merely existing. But as the music industry warps into an almost entirely digital affair — where “the user,” to borrow more tech-oriented terminology, is king — Warnock’s call to prioritize the fan experience in live performances becomes more urgent, not less.

What does the phrase “fan experience” really mean, though?

The first word in that phrase is more straightforward. For the purpose of this article, we will define a fan as any consumer of an entertainment product or service. We don’t imply any particular intensity of engagement, as fans can fall on a spectrum ranging from casual to die-hard. Moreover, by this definition, we can use the words fan, user and customer interchangeably. As long as artists are offering a product or service — say, an album, an in-person show, a piece of merch or a livestream — that fans value and pay for with money or time, they are customers of the artist’s business and brand.

Things get a little more complicated as we try to define an experience. In a business context — “customer experience,” “employee experience,” “retail experience,” “office experience,” etc. — the word “experience” is often used to describe a set of surface-level features or services. For instance, venues owners and technology providers often boast about offering “a total fan experience,” when in fact, they’re just announcing an upgrade to their lighting or WiFi systems.

Granted, such features help enhance the event overall, especially if they offer a dramatic improvement over whatever was in place before. However, an experience is not just a service — it runs much deeper, tapping into our individual and shared emotions and behaviors.

According to the International Organization of Standardization (ISO), user experience refers to a “person’s perceptions and responses resulting from the use and/or anticipated use of a product, system or service.” In other words, it’s not just about the tangible product or service; as the ISO writes, it’s also about “the users’ emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, behaviors and accomplishments that occur before, during and after use.” To revisit our venue technology example above, unless the outcome of implementing its lighting or WiFi upgrade directly helps to create lasting memories and emotions for fans, they are not core components of the “fan experience” as a whole.

Why is a good fan experience important in today’s music industry? The reasons expand far beyond just music alone.

As early as the 1990s, economists and executives have pointed to experiences as the new competitive frontier for business, after goods and services. As Joseph Pine and James Gilmore wrote in their 1998 Harvard Business Review article “Welcome to the Experience Economy”: “As services, like goods before them, increasingly become commoditized … experiences have emerged as the next step in what we call the progression of economic value” (emphasis added).

[Caption: Adaptation of Gilmore and Pine’s framework of the “progression of economic value” from 1998.]

Secondly, in the current decade, the individual customer is a more powerful stakeholder than ever. Year after year, Edelman’s Trust Barometer survey shows that people at large place less and less trust in business leaders and the media, and more and more trust in each other instead. From the rise of online reviews to the power of one voice to spark widespread awareness and change on social media, it is critical to place the individual customer at the center of any experience and take a fan-centric view to inform strategic decisions.

In the following sections, we will apply ways of thinking about the customer experience from other industries, such as e-commerce and software, to help clarify what a fan-centric experience could mean in music and how artists, labels, and promoters can implement a high-quality, authentic and strategic fan experience in their work.

Why current fan experiences in music fall short

Academics and marketers alike have spent decades researching what exactly drives consumer loyalty. One theory, based on a 2016 survey of 2,500 Gen Y-ers, is that digital loyalty in online shopping is a three-part combination of trust, brand equity (i.e. a brand’s social and perceived value), and a positive online experience or “flow.”

Applying this model to music, we can assume that popular artists already enjoy high levels of trust and appreciation for their brand among fans. In this scenario, a positive online experience is the missing link to maximize fan loyalty.

Yet holistic and integrated fan experiences, in the true sense of that term, are largely lacking in music today. As a fan, I will likely be streaming music on one platform, watching videos on another and getting artist-specific updates in my inbox from yet another group of third parties, with none of those channels talking clearly to each other. This fragmentation leads to gaping holes in communication and clarity with fans around their favorite artists’ updates.

Despite being so emotionally charged, the live experience in particular is often the most disconnected and least personal when it comes to the online fan experience, with little interaction between fan and artist before and after the show.

Take, for example, popular Brit singer Liam Payne, who announced this summer a series of ticketed livestream events hosted on Veeps. The message was broadcast to his millions of followers on Instagram. However, readers familiar with the challenges of organic social reach will know that there’s a massive gap between the number of followers for an account and the actual number of people who will see a post, at least without investing in paid advertising.

This is where an artists’ ecosystem beyond social media alone can be put to good use to amplify important messages. Assuming that a large number of Payne’s social followers would listen to the artist’s music through Spotify, we checked out the “On Tour” section of his Spotify artist page. At the time of the shows’ announcement, however, there was no mention of such events. Instead, the page listed an upcoming show in Italy, which had, in fact, already been canceled. Somehow that data (pulled by Spotify via Songkick) had not yet been updated (see screenshot below).

While this isn’t the end of the world, it means that Payne’s more than 10 million Spotify followers, including the many who would have opted in to receive emails from Spotify about artists they follow, may have missed this information about Payne’s upcoming virtual events. A rigorous, fan-centric approach to strategic planning may have minimized the risk of such an important event falling through the cracks.

However, what makes this kind of strategic planning challenging is that the pace of large-scale technological partnerships between corporations lags far behind artist and fan behavior. Spotify did not officially announce its partnership with Songkick and Ticketmaster to list virtual events until mid-September 2020 — a whole nine months into the global pandemic, at which point tens of thousands of artists had already been staging live stream shows and, in some cases, become burnt out with the format. While the extensive delay behind this partnership was certainly a missed opportunity, it was also out of artists’ control. And pre-pandemic, major ticketing platforms like Ticketmaster had already been building their competitive advantage around mostly one-sided approaches to owning customer data.

This demonstrates how critical it is for any artist to own as much of their fan relationships and communication as possible so that they don’t have to rely on a network of third parties to work things out for them. In many cases, platform and data ownership present a major hindrance to offering a smooth, holistic fan experience around an artist — and, if approached strategically through better marketing tools or data-sharing deals, can also present a major opportunity for future improvement.

Template: How to manage and optimize the online fan experience

Improving the online fan experience is not merely about enhancing a website’s cosmetics or rolling out a content marketing plan. This is about obtaining a deeper understanding of the fan’s needs by conducting qualitative and quantitative research, and taking coordinated, decisive actions to build a proposition to answer those needs. Remember, harking back to the ISO’s definition of “user experience,” it’s as much about intangible emotions and perceptions as it is about concrete usage and engagement.

One way to achieve this deeper understanding is through a popular framework in business and service design known as the customer journey map — or, in our case, a fan journey map. The purpose of this map is to methodically deconstruct every step of a fan’s journey with an artist’s brand online, whether the artist is releasing new content, promoting an upcoming event, or trying to break into new markets.

This journey mapping exercise can help strategic planning around an artist or music campaign in three primary ways:

We’ve created a free fan journey map template for you to use in your own strategic planning around fan-centric campaigns. Below, we walk through each part of the template, including a hypothetical artist case study.

Getting started: The objective

A customer journey map begins with some research on your core objective. Who is this for, and what is that target audience trying to achieve?

Below are a few examples for starters:

Diving in: The persona

Once the journey and its objective are defined, the next step is to go more in-depth on who exactly will be going through said journey.

Among marketers, a well-accepted way to do this is through personas, which are, in effect, fictitious characters who each represent a “typical” fan of the artist. Often, people give names to these characters (e.g. “Jane, a 30-something, from Ohio”), which can be useful for humanizing the journey-mapping process and referring to your fans more quickly throughout your strategic planning.

While there are entire articles (and careers) devoted to unpacking the art and science of defining personas, there are some fundamental rules of thumb that you can follow to quickly get started and fill in a fan journey map, which should cover at least one target persona. Short of being exhaustive, our suggestion is to be a mix of curious (look everywhere and try to spot patterns or oddities) and rigorous (leave your assumptions at the door and back everything up with actual behavioral and demographic data).

The data that informs your persona should be a mix of quantitative and qualitative:

You can rerun this process across as many different personas as you need. There are countless persona templates out there; this cheat sheet by a journey mapping software company is a solid reference.

Horizontal axis: Journey stages and touchpoints

On your journey map’s horizontal axis, you will deconstruct the fan’s journey into different temporal stages and concrete touchpoints.

As a start, you can use the three stages of before, during and after an “event” — whether that event is streaming an artist’s song or attending an actual IRL or digital live event. To identify touchpoints within each stage, you can draw from quantitative data to select your artist’s most relevant platforms. Or, you can put yourself directly in your fan’s shoes. For instance, if your journey is about acquiring new fans, you can Google your artist’s name from a mobile phone, click on the first result and continue on that journey clicking around as a new fan would. Better yet, watch someone do that in real-time and take notes of their comments.

Vertical axis: Fan requirements/needs and strategic initiatives

In the vertical axis, you will first describe the fans’ needs and requirements for each touchpoint, then address how those needs will be answered through strategic initiatives around the artist.

Fan requirements. Here, summarize what the fan is looking for in the corresponding touchpoint and stage. Remember to cite quantitative and qualitative data as evidence for what fans prioritize and seek in their experience around an artist. This stage is an excellent opportunity to identify opportunities to improve, where there might be a mismatch between the fan’s expectation and reality.

Strategic initiatives. Here, for each touchpoint, describe cross-functional strategic initiatives that are happening (or should happen) in your team or organization to service the above fan needs.

In our fan journey map template, we have broken these initiatives down into the following sections, which you are, of course, welcome to adapt to your situation:

Since this diagram is already quite detailed, we suggest that you don’t go too broad in your scope ,but rather deep-dive into a few touchpoints and nail every single detail on those select few, ensuring that you have the right resources aligned and that your entire team is working towards the same goals. Academic research suggests that less is more and that it is best to be easy on the descriptive side and instead focus more on deriving concrete strategy and action.

Fan journey case study: A hypothetical EDM artist livestream

Let’s imagine we are managing an international EDM artist with a substantial audience in the Netherlands. They are keen to play a performance in a cool location that will be shot and broadcast as a livestream. We have decided not to charge for the event; instead, we want to use this as an opportunity to capitalize on our millions of YouTube viewers to expand our owned fan base. User research has allowed us to build a persona, whom we will call Jan, a 25-year-old man who lives in the city of Amsterdam and exhibits mobile-first entertainment consumption behavior, almost exclusively through his iPhone.

In surveying our fans, we have identified two touchpoints that are particularly important to them: Spotify, as the inevitable go-to place to listen to music and find new releases, and YouTube, where we found out in interviews that fans particularly enjoy re-watching past live performances.

The table below is an excerpt from the fan journey map that would be built for this project. The fuller journey map would extend to perhaps six to ten columns to include other vital touchpoints and initiatives to promote and run the event and engage with the fan after the livestream. In this case, given that the journey must start through third-party platforms, the emphasis would be on driving the fans through our owned-and-operated channels. Perhaps, the livestream event itself would be hosted behind a soft wall, where the fans would have to register to access the video stream and would be given an opportunity to register to a newsletter.

[View and download an Excel copy of this hypothetical example here.]

Conclusion: Making it a success

Let’s wrap up with a few brief, practical considerations.

One, a fan journey map is ideally done as a group brainstorming workshop with a variety of stakeholders involved, not just as a solo exercise. The outcome of this kind of workshop is a low-tech journey map (think Post-it notes on a whiteboard), built on assumptions around fan personas and some crude data. A longer document can then be enhanced with more deeply researched insights, translating into a roadmap of actual work, with clear owners and deadlines for each initiative. Remember that the purpose of this work is to coordinate action, not just ideas.

Two, the map is not intended to be a finished, static product and should be revisited regularly. We would suggest conducting the exercise regularly to check progress against the objectives set and consider new user behaviors, pain points, or technologies. Running a fan experience workshop with key stakeholders every six to 12 months seems like a good rule of thumb (or even quicker if you’re comfortable, given that much of the digital music industry is moving faster in the wake of the pandemic).

This brings us to one last argument as to why a holistic view of the fan experience will become increasingly crucial for the music industry in the coming months. Although battered by the coronavirus, the music industry is fighting back through an unprecedented level of innovation with new technologies (e.g., live streaming, VR/AR/MR, in-game events) and business models (e.g., microtransactions, memberships, new forms of brand endorsement or in-game monetization). However, there’s a risk that these initiatives, which often happen on brand-new platforms, will only exacerbate the fragmentation that already exists in the media and entertainment landscape.

From a strategic perspective, it is vital that these initiatives are not siloed, but are made to work with and reinforce each other. For instance, if a band wants to experiment with a livestream event series and a paid-membership model, they should work together and be integrated on both the front-end (fan experience) and back-end (data integration and ownership). Perhaps paying members can get free access to the event, or enjoy a Q&A or virtual meet-and-greet with the artist before or after the virtual concert.

This notion of different initiatives working with each other to increase the overall competitive advantage of a brand or business is often referred to as “strategic fit.” In a music-specific context, this concept of strategic fit also has a direct parallel in the world of metadata and rights management, where many stakeholders from national governments to industry collectives like the Open Music Initiative have spoken to the importance of metadata frameworks being “interoperable” across a vast, complex landscape of tech solutions.

As to the ownership of a 360-degree fan experience, it remains to be seen how these activities can be coordinated and by whom. Hopefully, the next generation of music’s experience economy will create new opportunities for collaboration, rather than new fault lines.