What it really means to be "fan-first"

This is a recap of a mainstage discussion that took place at Water & Music’s Wavelengths Summit on May 6, 2023. You can read our overall recap of the Summit experience here.

Connecting artists and fans is one of the most critical functions of the music industry. It’s also facing an onslaught of new challenges, as technology expands fandom into a hyper-speed, 24/7 business.

With 120,000 new tracks hitting streaming services a day, it’s harder than ever for artists to break through and reach the right listeners, let alone cultivate fan bases long-term. Recent controversies like that around Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program have pointed to the limitations of centralizing and fragmenting consumer data when it comes to crafting a smooth and delightful fan experience. The always-on demands of social media have also led to issues around burnout and mental health for many artists, especially in the context of juggling digital marketing and community engagement with an already grueling touring schedule.

At our inaugural Wavelengths Summit in May 2023, we hosted a mainstage discussion bringing together artists, artist managers, tech founders, and industry analysts to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing the future of fandom — with a special focus on what it really means to build “fan-first” technologies and experiences for music. We explored the chicken-and-egg tension of building first for fans vs. for artists and industry-stakeholders, trends in fans’ adoption of tech, and strategies for monetizing fans effectively while maintaining the health and integrity of organic artist-fan relationships.

This discussion featured moderator Tatiana Cirisano (Music Analyst, MIDiA Research) and speakers Brux (artist), Denisha Kuhlor (founder, Stan), Derek Davies (Co-Founder/President, Medallion), and Brandon Sanchez (Artist Manager, ATC Management).

Listen to the full audio here, or read on for key quotes and takeaways from our conversation.

“Artists are the last industry to go direct-to-consumer. If in any other industry you were going to tell a business that you were going to separate them from the customer data around their most important product — which is music or live performances, in an artist’s case — they’d look at you like you were crazy. And yet that’s been the norm, the status quo up until now.

… I think one of the biggest barriers to entry … is the kind of lack of transparency and the kind of walled gardens of the current music industry where it’s really hard for artists to have a dimensional view of their fandom. Right now, an artist’s audience exists in little black boxes all over the internet and none of these black boxes talk to each other.”

– Derek Davies

“In this digital-first world, an artist is expected to do so much and give so much for their fans. But as the corollary of that, I think if an artist is super transparent around what they feel comfortable giving, it can help to empower the relationship, because the fans know that this is the artist’s boundaries.”

– Denisha Kuhlor

“When we talk about artist-fan relationships and engagement, we’re talking about a social skill. This is not a prerequisite for being an artist … We all have different levels of social comfort and how we interact with folks, whether we’re introverts or extroverts. I think some artists excel at it, and some artists have a really hard time with fan engagement and interaction. Especially when you’re talking about scaling overnight … if your song goes viral, you have suddenly thousands of people on your platforms ready to hear from you and wanting more music from you. And that’s not a given that people know how to deal with that interaction.”

– Brandon Sanchez

“We’re living in an era now where consumers, supporters, fans — we want to be more connected than ever. And if you don’t feel connected to your artists that you love, you might look elsewhere to see where you can get a better connection, or where you can get better engagement … From an artist’s perspective, it’s very difficult to be mindful of that every day.”

– Brux

“The macro trend right now is that things are shifting away from the anonymous sea of social media and these super broad macro experiences, both on the artist and fan level. People are seeking more niche, familiar micro communities and more intimate connections.”

– Derek Davies

“Noname has her book club, where every month she picks two or three books and reads them with her fans and they discuss them, and she does regular pop-ups across the United States. She attends one or two of them and helps facilitate and moderate, but the other ones are fan-led and community-led. I’m a huge fan and I feel just as connected to her even though she hasn’t been releasing music as much.”

– Denisha Kuhlor

“We did this really amazing campaign in Astor Place [for Like A Hammer] where we rented a newsstand and reskinned it to be like Yaeji’s own newsstand pop-up. And we had fans come and line up to buy the record there first before the album came out, and Yaeji would sign the record and say hi to them. And we could tell her, hey, you’re going to be here for one to two hours interacting with fans, and then you’re done. And in those few hours, she probably met like 200 fans — which is a lot of people, but it’s not unmanageable.”

– Brandon Sanchez