“Fan” is one of the most abused words in the music business’s lexicon. There is much talk about how to “engage” and “value” fans, making things as “fan-centric” as possible, with clichéd homily being layered upon clichéd homily like a platitude lasagne. What it too often means is the upending of music’s best customers and shaking them until coins rain from their pockets.
The worst excesses here are ludicrously ostentatious box sets from catalogue acts. Having seen the George Harrison box set going for £859.99, a John Lennon box set dramatically raised the stakes by retailing for an obscene £1,350. New acts are equally not shy in Oliver Twisting forward. Taylor Swift has sub-sections of her online store dedicated to specific records selling multiple album formats and related branded merchandise, ranging from hoodies and patches to purses and photo frames. There is a restless aggression to this hyper-strain of pop product pachinko.
This is only going to accelerate and mutate as being earmarked as “just” a mere “fan” curdles into a form of shaming (“Hey, if you really loved this act, you’d spend more…”). Meanwhile the ascension of the “superfan” becomes the new fait accompli buzzword for the industry.
Goldman Sachs’ latest Music In The Air report is forecasting that the “superfan” market could be worth $4.3bn globally next year. The subtext here is that this needs to become a priority focus for the music business as recorded music revenues actually fell short of Goldman Sachs’ expectations in 2024, causing it to downgrade its forecasts for this year to $31.4bn (readjusting the $33.9bn it had come up with in its 2024 forecasts for 2025).
The thinking is this: if the market in aggregate is not performing at the level the industry would like it to, the simple solution is to find ways to get its best spenders to dramatically increase their spending. Here a minority of fans are expected to correct a financial problem echoing across the business in toto.
This “correction” will not just happen through Versailles-size boxsets and a Gremlins-in-water approach to vinyl variants. It will blaze through streaming, which was worth $20.4bn globally last year for the record business (making up 69% of the total business).
Increasing individual monthly subscription prices alone (holding at an average of £9.99 for many years before rising to £10.99 in 2023 and £11.99 in 2024) is not going to be enough. We will soon see a tiered subscription model grip Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer and more. Plenty of rumours are swirling in the music business about Spotify’s “Music Pro” tier (improved audio, early access to concert tickets, remixing tools), with it possibly being plumped up to include some more superfan-pleasing (read: superfan-squeezing) components. Like a flirtatious exchange on a dating app, Spotify is not showing its hand here but equally is not not showing its hand.
There is, however, a much wider context to consider here. Spotify recently renewed its licensing deal with Universal Music Group (UMG) and adding some sort of superfan component was said to be a key clause. UMG has been very open about this new business opportunity in public statements and earning calls, stating that the targeting of superfans should be core to streaming’s next evolutionary leap forward. This is especially pressing as subscription streaming starts to hit saturation point in mature markets.
UMG is most definitely not ploughing a lonely furrow here, with the other majors seeing streaming as just one part of the superfan expansion strategy to sit alongside them launching bespoke superfan platforms and products as a priority.
Warner Music Group confirmed in 2024 that it was building its own superfan app, with Ed Sheeran as the leading #content guinea pig, but it now appears to be frantically renovating it before a public launch.
Sony Music is also cooking up something, having acquired Songwhip and Fansifter last year, two separate startups focused on building superfan experiences and providing deep audience insights.
The major labels have clearly looked at what Hybe has done with Weverse – or more specifically the money it has made from it – and what Kakao is trying to do with Berriz by targeting K-pop fans. But what works for K-pop does not always work for other genres and other acts.
This, of course, is all fine. The music business has to change, it must keep moving forward, new ideas should be tested out, profits should keep rising. Capitalism, yeah!
Except it all comes with enormous risks. Fandom is music’s greatest power in the market. Someone who is really into an artist feels incredibly loyal towards them. They can sit through some mediocre albums and shows as they believe golden times can return. But only the most devoted, or deluded, will happily sit through an unrelenting creative slump. At some point they will bail and stop buying all the products.
Fandom may appear unstoppable, but it is conditional. Fans have to feel valued and they have to be treated with a modicum of respect. They will put up with an awful lot of challenges and atrocious behaviour (how else does [REDACTED] still have an audience when they are clearly a terrible person with fascist views?); but this can slowly erode the audience until only a handful of fundamentalists are left yelling at each other about who has been hurt most by the artist (and therefore is the truest fan).
There was a theory that gripped the music business in the early 2000s, around the time when bold claims were being made that MySpace would kill off the need for record labels and tech-utopianism was effervescing through online discourse. Kevin Kelly posited the idea that creative people only need “thousands of true fans” to make a decent living, an idea that got compressed down to 1,000 True Fans.
He wrote: “A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the ‘best-of’ DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.”
It has been criticised as wonderful on paper but less wonderful (and considerably more fraught) in practice, condemned as a naive attempt to craft a neat and streamlined theory that does not slot into the irregularity of reality.
But we can see that acts can operate outside of the mainstream, whatever that even is today, and have sustainable careers, cutting their commercial cloth accordingly. Acts like Suede, Sea Power, Half Man Half Biscuit and more might not be ordering their third swimming pools just yet, but they have managed to exist at a certain level for many years due to: a) having a loyal fanbase; b) not taking that fanbase for granted; by c) never subjecting them to what could be seen as glorified pickpocketing.
They are all propped up by a healthy portion of their overall fanbase who will possibly buy the album on one or two different formats (possibly even a fancy box set, but not one that costs a month’s rent), who will go to multiple nights on the tour and regularly visit the merch table. Their expenditure is robust, not reckless.
What these acts are not doing is ruthlessly “segmenting” their audiences to, eyes bulging with greed, target those pockets of fans with the deepest pockets, offering them 20 different colour vinyl editions and an entire walk-in wardrobe of branded garments, chastising them that they are not real fans until they buy everything. It’s the Pokémonisation of products: gotta catch ‘em all.
The problem with the superfan bonanza currently gripping the upper echelons of the music business (“There’s gold in them thar shills!”) is the risk of it all flipping into unchecked avarice and hyper-charged rapaciousness. The danger, and the record business has plenty of form here, is that greed only begets more greed; it goes from creating products for superfans to increasing both the number of products and the price of products for supersuperfans.
It threatens to take Oscar Wilde’s line about the definition of a fool (“someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”) as an instruction manual rather than a warning.
In this grift drift, the obsession with short-term gain can only cause long-term damage to fans’ trust. And once you lose their trust, you have lost everything. It’s like throwing a Picasso on the fire just to stay warm for half an hour.
The guiding principle should always be “true fans” and never “screw fans”.
