Superfan experiences reinvented — and repriced — for a digital world

By: Cherie Hu

Published: 2020-07-21

Seeking to make up for lost touring income and diversify their online presence, artists are leaning on an increasingly crowded landscape of tech tools to offer new digital experiences for their superfans.

In-person VIP meet-and-greets have largely suffered the same fate as concerts and tours, with the likes of KISS, Eric Nam and Niall Horan either cancelling their meet-and-greet events early on or issuing a strict “no-touching” policy. To maintain the health, safety and security of everyone involved while opening up access to a global audience, more and more artists are opting to connect with their superfans remotely instead.

The landscape of platforms to get this job done is more fragmented than ever:

Other kinds of online fan experiences beyond meet-and-greets include personalized video messages and social-media shout-outs. For instance:

Yes, this is overwhelming.

That said, the baseline features across these different platforms are quite similar to each other. Artists have more control over the pricing, duration and boundaries of their fan experiences, and pay the platform either a percentage of revenue (e.g. Cameo and Topeka take a 25% cut; Chatalyze takes 15% of transactions and donations for paid chats) or a fixed rate based on usage (e.g. Looped Live charges talent $2.50 per minute). On several live meet-and-greet platforms, fans can chat with each other in a digital “queue” or “waiting room,” screenshot their chats with artists and even ask artists to sign a “digital autograph.” Many of these platforms are also intentionally built for shorter, higher-value interactions — for instance, Fundo and Chatalyze only allow artists to chat with individual fans for up to 10 and 15 minutes each, respectively — mimicking how normal meet-and-greets would work in person.

Given the ongoing uncertainty around the future of live events, artists will only be leaning further into these digital superfan experiences in the coming months. In my mind, this has two major implications for artists’ careers: 1) Superfan experiences will become a year-round rather than cyclical revenue stream, and 2) as a result, artists will have to reckon with their own digital value.

Meet-and-greets become year-round, not seasonal, and part of a wider suite of digital fan engagement

Typically, meet-and-greets and other in-person superfan experiences are cyclical. Usually, they are available only in the context of a given artist’s touring schedule, often as part of a premium “VIP” package that includes special venue seating and/or exclusive physical swag in addition to the chance to meet the artist face-to-face.

With touring off the table, what is now happening is that artists are essentially unbundling and scaling these VIP packages for a more global, non-cyclical audience. Now, a fan can hypothetically request a personalized video message, shout-out or live chat with an artist on any of the above platforms at any time of year, regardless of whether the artist is touring. Or, the artist can schedule a series of live chats on their own schedule, but in a way that isn’t tied to any specific album or tour promotion campaign. And because these events aren’t happening in person, the fan will likely get a bigger bang for their buck.

In going 100% remote, these superfan experiences also become just one part of a wider suite of digital channels for direct fan engagement and support beyond streaming. Peter Karpas, founder and CEO of Starsona, tells me that he sees artists using at least three different kinds of platforms for direct fan support in the future: “Something like Kickstarter to raise money for one-off projects, something like Patreon for longer-term subscriptions and then something like Starsona that can serve as a storefront for one-off interactions.”

Jordan Winawer, co-founder and CEO of Chatalyze, sees these different channels becoming more integrated over time. “Some Patreon creators include virtual meet-and-greets on Chatalyze in one or more of their membership tiers,” Winawer tells me. “We can take a full view of the artist or creator, and help them think of ways not just to open up new revenue streams, but also to integrate this into what they’re already doing.”

One remaining obstacle to making this paradigm a wider reality is the extent to which artists can actually follow up with superfans after the fact. As of now, there is no consistency across these platforms in whether artists own or can even access their superfan data in the first place. For instance, Starsona gives artists each fan’s “name, contact info and purchase history” on the platform, such that “artists can remarket to them,” says Karpas; in contrast, Cameo and Chatalyze offer little to no fan data to the artist that they can export elsewhere.

Artists will have to reckon with their own digital value

Amidst all these different meet-and-greet platforms emerging, an interesting conversation has also started to emerge about an artist’s digital value.

Pre-pandemic, there was already a reckoning years in the making about the prohibitive prices of VIP meet-and-greet experiences. The highest VIP packages for stars like Lady Gaga and Ed Sheeran can easily cost in the mid-thousands of dollars. Sources in the touring industry previously suggested that higher prices for meet-and-greets were justifiable given the rising costs of putting on tours and manufacturing merchandise, and a promoter like Live Nation often has a more involved role in organizing and pricing VIP packages than the artists themselves. That said, the likes of LANY and The 1975’s Matt Healy have recently refused to charge for meet-and-greets as a countermeasure.

Such a reckoning with the value of the artist-fan relationship has never really happened in the digital world yet, because there hasn’t been a demand for it — until now.

In recent years, most of the industry discourse around an artist’s digital value has revolved around the low margins of streaming payouts, which remains at the center of many artists’ shared struggle to pay their bills amidst the pandemic. In the context of streaming aggregation, songs are commodities, and individual artists have no control over the pricing of their own work. The way that platforms like Spotify calculate and facilitate payouts to artists also incentivizes repeat listening from fans, which rewards only certain kinds of music.

Digital superfan platforms like the ones listed above present a much different scenario. Not only do they allow artists to control pricing, but they also inherently reward shorter interactions priced at a much higher value — turning the economics of streaming on its head. And the question artists need to think about becomes not “how much do fans value my music?,” but rather “how much do fans value me?”

Cameo, which has been around since 2017 and has perhaps the largest talent roster of any superfan platform (40,000 stars and counting), may be the most interesting petri dish for studying pricing models for superfans. Galanis tells me that in the first few weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S., the average price per video on Cameo went down to around $36; ever since, though, it’s almost doubled to around $70 per video.

“Part of that is because we have bigger and bigger talent joining the platform,” says Galanis. “Before COVID, if someone didn’t come on Cameo, it was often because they were too busy or were making too much money to care. Now, effectively every artist gig, from festivals to meet-and-greets, is cancelled, so these artists are less busy than they’ve ever been and much more of their income has gone away.”

Recently, Cameo has also introduced features for sending paid DMs (e.g. you have 250 characters to “say hi to Lalah Hathaway for $9.99”), as well as booking live Zoom calls with celebrities instead of just à-la-carte video messages. The prices for Zoom calls tends to be much higher; the most notorious example is from actor Jeremy Piven, who for a few days was charging $15,000 for a 10-minute call (his Calendly booking link for Zoom calls was quickly taken down). “Zoom calls are absolutely more expensive, but if a celebrity is charging $400 for a 30-second Cameo video and $2,000 for a 10-minute Zoom call, that’s relatively a really good deal,” says Galanis, who adds that “we tell talent they should charge 5x to 10x their standard Cameo price for a Zoom call, but people who charge 2x to 3x tend to do better.”

The competition is getting fiercer as the likes Starsona also home in on à-la-carte superfan offerings revolving around smaller social-media interactions. For instance, you can ask select celebrities on Starsona to “like and comment on a public post” or “follow a fan” on the social platform of your choice for a fee. Karpas claims that expanding the suite of offerings from just meet-and-greets to wider social engagement helps increase accessibility for fans: “Part of the advantage of having a wider range of products is that you can offer them at multiple price points,” he says. (This is similar to how Patreon gives creators the ability to set up multiple, differently-priced tiers for their memberships.)

Whether you think it’s “right” to ask fans to pay to DM or chat with an artist depends on your own opinions on how artists should be running their careers today. Ever since “friending” on Facebook became an everyday verb a decade ago, online relationships have been monetized and performed to the point of making questions of “authenticity” in human connection seem almost pointless, especially in the context of fans’ quasi-social relationships with artists.

For stars of a certain level, even a bit of monetization can be an effective filter that reduces unnecessary spam, makes stars feel less overwhelmed and ultimately makes loyal fans happier. “I was once talking with Cardi B, and she said that she would want to be able to DM fans for free,” says Galanis. “But then she has to go through probably millions of unread DMs and requests that she would never be able to get to in full. If she charged 99 cents for fans to DM her, probably 90% of the fans who would have otherwise DMed her won’t do it, and the subset that remains is much more manageable. Price is a necessary friction that enables fulfillment.”

In addition, what may be particularly disruptive is the ability for these platforms to scale a robust, long-term VIP business to artists who would otherwise be overlooked or left behind by other channels like streaming because they are either too early or too late in their careers. As New York Times media columnist Ben Smith recently claimed, fame is in the eye of the beholder in the Internet age, and one person’s one-hit wonder can be another person’s source of fandom and excitement for years. Presumably, this can work in favor of the long tail at a scale that in-person touring simply cannot.

“In the past, a one-hit wonder might have only given you 15 minutes of fame to monetize on,” says Galanis. “In 2020, it can give you a platform to monetize for the rest of your life.”