There has been numerous discuss lately of music superfans and the way they could be the shining mild of the business’s future. Little shock, given how report labels are attempting to ascertain superfans as the following development driver for an investor group that’s rising more and more involved about slowing streaming development and looming threats, comparable to AI. There is little doubt that superfans are essential – they all the time have been. The downside is that they is probably not as invaluable sooner or later as they as soon as had been. And the explanations for that lie in the exact same streaming financial system that the business is making an attempt to construct past.
A quick historical past of superfans
In the early days of the fashionable music enterprise, music followers had been the superfans. The technique of demonstrating that fandom was shopping for the data and, should you had been actually fortunate, seeing the band. A small portion had been additionally members of (often fan-run) fan golf equipment. Throughout the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, the music enterprise additional professionalised and productised. The stay enterprise emerged as a income generator in its personal proper (relatively than the loss-leader for promoting albums that it had largely been). Merchandise grew to become extensively deployed. Fanclubs grew to become extra critical.
Yet, music gross sales had been nonetheless the primary fandom sport on the town. The CD period catalysed music shopping for at scale and the heyday of the album period. Superfans would purchase a number of albums each month (resulting in the rise of the ‘50 quid bloke’). Superfans had been album followers. Superfans had been album consumers. And there was no ceiling on how a lot they might spend.
Then alongside got here Napster, turning the world the other way up. Music gross sales began to plummet and the album started its lengthy, regular demise, as customers dissected albums, first on Napster, then iTunes, after which YouTube and Spotify.
When everyone seems to be tremendous….
When Spotify got here to market, the recorded music business was in disaster, with revenues in freefall. People simply weren’t shopping for albums anymore. 50 quid bloke had grow to be an endangered species. Recorded music’s loss was stay’s acquire. As music gross sales fell, stay revenues grew, virtually in mirror reverse curves. Live grew to become the place superfans started to shift their spend, with merch gross sales rising in stay’s wake.
So, when Spotify got here together with the promise of getting folks again into the behavior of spending on recorded music once more, it was eagerly welcomed. Perhaps not instantly, as a lot of the label group wanted convincing, however that velocity bump was cleared when labels began to see customers commit, at scale, to month-to-month spend. With extra folks spending extra regularly, income development returned. The downside was that these individuals who used to purchase a number of albums each month, now solely spent the price of lower than one album to get all of the music they might ever need.
Streaming positioned a cap on superfan spend. As the years handed, newer, youthful music followers got here into the market who had by no means spent massive chunks of their disposable earnings on shopping for albums. The common, semi-casual fan was now spending the identical as superfans. And to cite Syndrome from the Incredibles “When everyone’s super, no one’s super”.
Nurture fandom, don’t simply harvest it
Over current years, the business has began to nudge folks in direction of turning into superfans once more, or a minimum of spending like them. Whether that be indie followers on Bandcamp, or Swifties being satisfied to ‘help Taylor’ by shopping for one more re-recorded album. The downside is that this behaviour is on the fringes of client behaviour. We have had 15 years (i.e., virtually a technology’s price of time) of teaching customers that music doesn’t have to price greater than $9.99….okay….$10.99. Superfans have been un-supered.
None of that is to say that there’s not an enormous superfan alternative available, however it should take work. Much of the latent superfan spend has dissipated resulting from fading habits and the pockets share shift to stay. Consumers will want re-educating, re-familiarising. But there may be extra to it than that. When customers spend cash on a stay live performance, they get a singular, within the second expertise. When they used to purchase 5 albums a month, they obtained hours of recent music that they’d not have had in any other case. Buying a particular version of an album is just one other model of one thing that followers have already got on streaming.
So, to Make Fans Super Again™, there needs to be a real worth trade. Fans want new issues to influence them to spend, new issues that truly construct and deepen their fandom relatively than merely a brand new alternative to fleece them for an additional greenback.