MBW Views is a series of op-eds from eminent music industry people… with something to say. The following MBW op/ed comes from Mag Rodriguez, Founder/CEO, of superfan-focused platform EVEN.
Here, Rodriguez argues that the industry has embraced the idea of the superfan without being able to actually identify who those fans are, because the data that defines them is scattered across the many different platforms fans use.
He makes the case that understanding and serving superfans starts with bringing that fragmented picture together, rather than simply designing new products and pricing tiers around them.
Everyone in the music business is selling a superfan strategy right now. Almost nobody can identify a single superfan.
Sit through any earnings call or streaming keynote this year and you will hear the same story: the passive listener is monetized. The committed fan is not. The gap between them is the music industry’s next decade of growth.
The diagnosis is accurate. The assumption behind it is wrong.
The industry talks about the superfan as if it were the same singular fan at the top of the fan pyramid, waiting to buy a more expensive product.
I have spent the last four years looking at that pyramid from the inside, across direct-to-fan campaigns that have put albums at No.1 on the Billboard 200 and helped fill arena tours with the artist’s own website at the center of the campaign.
Here is what it shows from one album release.
The top spender spent $677.99 and streamed the album just 14 times.
The top listener played it 971 times and spent $7.99.
The most active community member sent 474 messages and only pressed play once.
The pattern runs throughout the data. Eleven of the 25 most active listeners spent $10 or less. Nineteen of the 25 most active fans in the community chat spent more than $100 each. The people driving conversation often aren’t the ones driving streams. They’re the ones driving revenue.
Three different superfans. Three different ways to show up.
The spender quietly buys everything. The community chat leader organizes trips to shows, recruits other fans and influences everyone else’s purchases. The listener streams constantly but has not bought anything beyond the digital version of the album.
Each creates value in a different way. Yet most superfan strategies treat them as the same customer – with the same offer.
So why doesn’t the industry already know this?
Because nobody can actually see the whole fan.
“The industry talks about the superfan as if it were the same singular fan at the top of the fan pyramid, waiting to buy a more expensive product. ”
Mag Rodriguez, EVEN
This isn’t a failure of effort or technology. It’s a consequence of how the industry was built. The presale lives on one platform. The merchandise store lives on another system. The tour presale sits with the ticketer. The community lives on a chat app. The streams live inside the DSP. Each platform owns a fragment of the relationship.
Five vendors, five databases, five fragments of the same fan, and nothing connecting them.
So when someone says, “we’re building a superfan strategy,” ask one question: Can you actually identify your superfans by name? Not a segment or a demographic. Actual people. For most of the industry, the answer is no.
The industry didn’t discover the superfan. It invented a word for a customer it couldn’t actually see. That has real consequences.
Marketing dollars chase the listener, because streaming is easy to measure. Premium products are built for big spenders but promoted to communities populated by entirely different fans. Meanwhile the fan who joined the presale list, bought two vinyl editions and drove four hours to a show is being retargeted with an ad for an album they already own.
We have seen what happens when the fragments come together.
When music, commerce, community and ticketing sit in one place, teams stop seeing disconnected transactions and start seeing actual customer relationships. In one recent campaign EVEN powered end-to-end, More than 600,000 fans opted in through the artist’s website. That identified audience went on to drive the sale of more than 800,000 tickets during the initial tour presale – one of the largest artist presales ever.
That didn’t happen because those fans were more devoted than anyone else’s. It happened because, for once, the artist and their team could see all of them.
At EVEN, we don’t reduce a fan to a single score or tier. We look at three dimensions: 1) what fans say 2) what fans buy and 3) what fans listen to. This isn’t sophisticated marketing. It’s simply knowing your customer. Every consumer business has worked this way for decades – but not the music business.
So here is my challenge to everyone building a superfan strategy right now. Stop designing tiers. Start building a Unified Fan Record.
First, unify fan identity. Before you launch another superfan product, make sure every fan has one record. If you can’t answer the question, “what did this one fan buy, say and stream,” then you are solving the wrong problem.
Second, stop defining superfans by spend alone. The biggest spender, listener and community builder each create value differently. Stop treating them as one fan archetype.
Third, treat community activity as a leading indicator, not a vanity metric. The fans requesting tour stops, organizing travel and recruiting friends are telling you where demand is headed long before it shows up in ticket sales, and on this release, like others we see, they were also among the highest spenders in the base. If nobody on the team reads the chat, you are leaving routing, pricing and marketing signals on the table.
Before you price the superfan, prove you can find them. If your strategy depends on stitching together spreadsheets from five different platforms, you don’t have a superfan strategy.
The fan was never fragmented. The industry fragmented them, one platform at a time.
The companies that win the next decade of this business will be the ones who can see a single view in which every stream, every message, and every dollar points to the same fan.Music Business Worldwide
