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When NxWorries, the duo of Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge, released their second album on June 7, they made it available on vinyl, CD, and cassette. But fans had to wait a week to stream Why Lawd? The goal was “to recreate the nostalgic feeling of truly appreciating the experience of a physical product that we all grew up with in the pre-streaming era,” says Anna Savage, who manages Paak.
Not only that: “We wanted to do something special for their fans by giving them an opportunity to experience the record a little earlier,” adds Jason McGuire, general manager at Stone’s Throw, the label that supports NxWorries. Combined with a pop-up event in L.A., hopefully “more people [are] talking about the record leading up to the streaming date.”
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Most modern albums are released simultaneously on streaming services and in an array of physical versions — or they hit streamers first and the vinyl edition comes later. But as the streaming model is increasingly under attack from all sides, for undervaluing music and limiting artists’ ability to cultivate relationships with their fans, more acts are experimenting with alternative rollout strategies.
There shouldn’t be “a one-size-fits-all strategy,” says Andrew Jervis, chief curator of Bandcamp. “We’re talking about art here — we’re not talking about widgets.”
The hope is that different approaches can fire up the base and serve to re-engage some listeners at a time when album releases are increasingly rote, with all the magic of a morning commute. “The consumer is not happy with the way that they are consuming music right now,” says Enrique “Mag” Rodriguez, founder of EVEN, a platform that enables artists to sell albums and experiences directly to fans before their releases hit streaming services.
Testing alternate release strategies may also allow musicians to generate more money from their biggest followers. “If you permanently emphasize pointing your fans somewhere where they can simply listen to whatever they want, whenever they want, for this rental fee, it’s kind of hard to convince them to come back and open their wallet,” Jervis notes.
As former Spotify chief economist Will Page wrote recently, “for a streamer to provide a record label the same amount of value from an album as a vinyl buyer, a customer would need to press play over 5,000 times — or stream for almost two weeks straight without sleep,” a virtual impossibility.
“Consumers are paying more for the same with vinyl,” Page continued, “but paying less to access more with streaming.”
Notably, a lot of alternate rollout ideas echo debates from roughly a decade ago, when the music streaming model was starting to take hold. Rodriguez points to Nipsey Hussle, who famously sold 1,000 copies of his 2013 release Crenshaw for $100 a piece while also making the project available for free on various mixtape sites. The rapper said at the time that he was “focused on fully serving the [fans] that have connected already.”
Around the same time, multiple stars like Adele kept albums off the platforms for a time — 25 didn’t make it to Spotify until seven months after release, for example, which helped ensure a massive first week of sales. (Adele said new releases “should be an event” and called the streaming model “a bit disposable.”) Some artists debuted albums exclusively on Apple Music or TIDAL before making them available more widely, or made them available only for premium subscribers.
But these “windowing” strategies went out of fashion in the mainstream music industry. Major labels and prominent indies often want streams and physical sales to hit the same week, so they can maximize the first-week numbers that the industry uses to judge commercial success. More than 600 million people around the world now listen to music on Spotify every month — any artists looking for global scale are unlikely to turn their back on that potential audience. Plus they are wary of offending the streaming services by withholding releases.
Smaller artists and record companies are making different calculations, however. At this level, earning even just a few hundred extra CD or LP sales by temporarily withholding an album from streaming can provide a nice boost.
While Jervis “encourage[s] people to put their music in as many places as possible,” he has seen this boost firsthand. Last year, the duo Knower released Knower Forever exclusively on Bandcamp. “They were pretty forthright about, ‘we need to make some money, here’s where you can come and support us by buying this record,’” Jervis says. And that’s what fans did, purchasing “something like $85,000 worth of vinyl and some similar amount in digital.” The album didn’t appear on Spotify until several months later.
One of the Top 25 labels on Bandcamp is International Anthem, the jazz label co-founded by Scott McNiece; for about six months, the company has been experimenting with putting out physical releases and digital downloads a month before uploading albums to streaming platforms. Like McGuire, McNeice says, “we want to be serving people who care enough about that particular album or artist to directly purchase the music.”
International Anthem hasn’t “received any pushback yet from streaming services as far as other people getting the album before them,” according to McNiece. And as an added bonus, indie record store owners are thrilled with the label’s approach. “Especially with the dwindling media market for music, having people care about your music on the ground level at independent record stores is one of the main ways to get the word out,” McNiece continues. “We’ve gotten an enormous amount of positive feedback” from record store owners who are excited to have an exclusive release to tout to customers.
Both McGuire and McNiece believe that offering physical releases first will not cannibalize the streaming audience. The people who buy the record will probably stream it at some point anyway.
Not only that, “before, when all the different formats were released on the same day, our energy was split with our messaging,” McNiece adds. Stream the album! Buy the vinyl! Under the new regime, though, “we’re able to focus a lot more energy specifically on driving traffic to those streaming platforms” once the albums are uploaded to the various services — a later streaming date provides a second marketing moment.
Rodriguez is also adamant that selling directly to fans before putting albums on streaming services is additive. “As fans purchase, they are more likely to share on social media, boosting artist algorithms,” he says. “This also translates to increased visibility on streaming platforms.”
EVEN, which raised more than $2 million in 2023, has run more than 3,500 campaigns for artists to date. Rodriguez likens his platform to traditional movie theaters and music streaming services to Netflix. “Most campaigns go live on EVEN 14+ days before their wide release,” he says. “The average album sells for $25, and the average single sells for $9. It’s all done in a pay-what-you-want model, where the fan decides its value, with a minimum preset by the artist.”
“We aren’t taking away from the traditional models that exist,” Rodriguez adds. “No one is squeezing the lemon in this way.”
Fan engagement platform Stationhead is now offering even more ways for users to connect with artists and each other.
Today (June 13), Stationhead announces an all-access tier that allows fans to get perks like a badge in fans’ profiles that verifies their fandom, the ability to create posts in their fandom’s threads, a priority placement on guest call-in lists when artists and hosts call in to speak during a live event, along with access to another chat populated exclusively by top-tier fans.
As reported by Billboard in April, Stationhead is a destination for dedicated fanbases of more than 1,000 artists.
Stationhead users can earn this all-access tier by engaging with the app daily and streaming events and release parties, with a data-driven feature determining the top superfans who’ll receive access. After seven days of daily use, fans unlock the All-Access membership tier for 30 days, which can be extended for each consecutive seven-day streak.
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Thus far, artists including Zayn Malik and Aespa have engaged with this new feature to do ticket giveaways and other offerings.
Launched in 2017, Stationhead has become a popular social music platform for artists and fans to stream and listen to live music in together, along with many other functions designed to connect artists and fans. The app functions much like a digital pirate radio station, where anyone with a streaming music account can host their own station and play music, with other users able to log on and listen, chat and even call in and speak to the DJ.
“It’s easy to toss around the idea of superfandom, to say that we need focus on superfans, but it’s hard to create something that really serves fans and gives them what they want,” Stationhead founder and CEO Ryan Star says in a statement. “We’ve done that at Stationhead by focusing on the fun and rewarding side of online events, instead of merely trying to extract value from passionate music lovers. All-Access builds on this and makes fandom feel even more engaging and rewarding, by highlighting the most enthusiastic people in an artists’ community.”
The company’s co-founder and COO Murray Levison adds that this new tier will help “turns fandoms into fan armies.”
In 1995, Peter Shapiro purchased the New York club Wetlands. “That was the home of the jam band, Grateful Dead scene in New York,” he recalls. At the time, though, “it wasn’t cool to be a Deadhead. And Wetlands wasn’t necessarily the cool play.”
But styles that were frowned upon by one generation are often taken up by the next. While many artists — and the mainstream music business — ignored jam bands for years, this has started to change. Intrigued by the scene’s genre-hopping open-mindedness and the unwavering devotion of its followers at a time when “superfan” is the industry buzzword of choice, the rest of the music business has started to take an interest in a space it long kept at arm’s length.
“If you’re a pop artist, and you see a bunch of bearded weirdo hippies able to do whatever they want on their own terms, that’s an appealing path to think about,” says Mike Luba, longtime manager of the String Cheese Incident.
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At festivals, “you’re seeing jam bands pop up on lineups that are traditionally more indie rock or haven’t really touched the jam thing in the past,” explains Dave DiCianni, who co-manages Goose along with other jam bands like Eggy and Pigeons Playing Ping Pong. “It’s cool to see it permeating into general pop culture,” he adds.
The Big Bang for jam bands, according to Shapiro, was the death of the Dead’s Jerry Garcia in 1995. “Everyone saw the Dead; they were the number one touring band in the 1990s,” Shapiro continues. “Garcia dies, and that audience of live music, improvisation-loving people splinters. That creates the jam band scene. Phish lifts up” — the band first cracked Pollstar‘s highest grossing U.S. tours list at the end of 1994 — “along with String Cheese Incident, Disco Biscuits, Medeski Martin and Wood,” and more.
Over the years, groups associated with the scene “will pop in and out of mainstream pop culture,” Luba says, pointing to Rusted Root and the Spin Doctors. But many of the acts in this space were overlooked, if not dismissed outright, by the mainstream music industry, in part because they didn’t generate chart hits or millions of streams, even as they moved lots of tickets. Nick Stern, whose management client Karina Rykman is “jam adjacent,” contends that the jam scene is “the most looked down-upon genre in the music business.”
For some artists, that gives it an inherent underdog appeal: “I’m interested in things that are unfashionable,” Vampire Weekend lead singer Ezra Koenig told The New York Times Magazine in 2020. He also noted that he finds Phish “more inspiring, forward-thinking, exciting and talented than a lot of what was higher up in the cool hierarchy;” Vampire Weekend recently hopped on stage with Goose, the new arena-filling stars of the jam scene.
Jam acts may also be benefitting from the catholic tastes fostered in the streaming era — as DiCianni puts it, listeners’ interests are now “less compartmentalized.” And artists and managers in the jam band scene posit that its emphasis on being present, in the moment, with a like-minded community for an ever-changing live experience offers an increasingly potent antidote to the distracted, frenetic, nichified, social media-driven world.
But there’s another reason why the mainstream music industry is increasingly interested in jam acts. “People outside the jam band space are coming to me almost in awe of the fandom in this scene,” says Ben Baruch, Goose’s other co-manager.
In interviews over the last six months, many of the most powerful executives in music have talked up the importance of cultivating “superfans.” Despite music’s popularity, it is poorly monetized compared to spaces like gaming. This is partially because the music streaming model currently offers artists few ways to foster meaningful connections with followers. Jam bands have been doing this for decades — perhaps because they didn’t get much support from the traditional industry, and have never depended on record sales or streaming.
Jam band devotees are impressively diligent about attending shows, buying merchandise, and streaming live performances, which change nightly. “They almost treat their favorite bands like a sports team, where they’re following along with what happens in every moment in every show,” says Ethan Berlin, who is co-agent for Goose, Pigeons and Rykman, among others. “They’re so invested — for years.”
And these fans have long had “ears that are a mile wide,” according to Rykman. At a time when the walls between the jam world and the rest of the music industry appear more porous, jam enthusiasts have flexed their muscles to help propel some artists from adjacent worlds to greater heights.
Take Billy Strings: The versatile guitarist and songwriter, now signed to Warner’s Reprise Records, has picked up Grammy nominations for Best American Roots Performance and Best Country Duo/Group Performance; he won the award for Best Bluegrass Album in 2021. At the same time, Strings has played with Bill Kreutzmann (a founding member of the Dead), String Cheese Incident and Goose, among others. He saw “there’s another whole world where traditional bluegrass can actually cross over and be accepted,” Luba says. Strings’ current tour includes multiple arenas.
Berlin is also the agent for Khruangbin, a trio whose dreamy instrumental grooves now attract 10,000 to 25,000 tickets per market; Berlin describes them as “not quite jam, maybe not even jam-adjacent, but definitely jam-friendly.” Notably, “they were embraced by that scene early in their career, ” he continues. “One of the first looks they had outside of Houston, where they’re from, was when they were invited to play Lockn’ Festival [one of the leading jam gatherings] in 2016.”
For Rykman, whose 2023 debut album featured guitar from Phish co-founder Trey Anastasio, this is one of “the beautiful things about the jam space.” “Myself, Khruangbin, Vulfpeck, we’re not jam bands with capital J’s — none of us play two sets, we still play three-minute songs,” she continues. “But jam band fans were early” to signal appreciation.
Similarly minded artists — what Rykman calls “singular groovy organisms” — might also want to court this community — music-loving superfans hiding in plain sight who can help them build the sort of formidable live business that ensures a long career. Another one of Baruch’s management clients is the Disco Biscuits; in the past 18 months, he says “they’re growing more than they have in 20 years.”
“What musician wouldn’t want that level of diehard fan?” Berlin asks.
This week, Sony Music Entertainment CEO Rob Stringer called on streaming companies to charge a “modest fee” for ad-supported streaming. “This would help develop this segment of the streaming business to be more than just a marketing funnel for paid subscription and still be a tremendous value for users,” he said during parent company Sony’s business segment presentations on Thursday.
Stringer’s comments didn’t come as a surprise. In March, after the RIAA released a report on the U.S. recorded music market in 2023, Billboard asked if record labels had become too reliant on subscription services for their revenues. With consumers proving willing to pay for rising prices, free streaming options aren’t producing the royalties to match their popularity.
Now, there’s evidence that subscriptions could become even more important for record labels, music publishers and creators.
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This month, Spotify levied additional price increases in the United Kingdom and Australia on top of a global price hike in July 2023. An individual plan now costs 11.99 pounds in the United Kingdom, up from 10.99 pounds, while a family plan was raised to 19.99 pounds from 17.99 pounds. Spotify has not announced a second wave of price increases in the United States and other major markets, but it’s reasonable to assume the United Kingdom and Australia won’t be alone.
The major labels have welcomed these price hikes as streaming’s importance to their bottom lines continues to increase. In the United States, subscriptions accounted for 59.3% of total recorded music revenues in 2023, up from 57.8% in 2022. Globally, subscriptions accounted for 48.9% of recorded music revenue in 2023, according to the IFPI, up from 48.3% in 2022.
Spotify and other platforms could soon offer a high-priced tier for superfans that would make subscriptions an even more valuable component of the music industry. Spotify first mentioned the possibility of “superfan clubs” in an online post in January. The next month, CEO Daniel Ek listed “superfan things” — as well as audiobook sales — among the products Spotify could offer if Apple did not take a 30% cut of in-app purchases.
In April, Michael Nash, Universal Music Group (UMG) executive vp of digital strategy, said during the company’s earnings call that internal research suggests 10% to 20% of subscribers would be willing to pay extra for a “super premium” tier. Nash wasn’t just thinking out loud: Given how carefully public companies choose their words, it stands to reason that he and other UMG executives are encouraging streaming companies to explore ways to offer an elevated service at a higher price.
Recent subscription price increases could be just the beginning of the sort of regular, ongoing price appreciation already seen in the video streaming market. Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl said on the company’s May 9 earnings that call that it “will continue to advocate for further increases” and “ensure that the value that music provides to these platforms is properly recognized.” Reservoir Media CEO Golnar Khosrowshahi said during the company’s earnings call on Thursday (May 30) the company expects “a regular cadence of price increases” from streaming services.
Subscription price appreciation has put free streaming in a poor light, however. As streaming services have been raising prices, a weak advertising market has made free streaming even less valuable. Free streaming isn’t without value — it provides an opportunity to convert listeners into paid subscribers, just as marketing campaigns do. But labels clearly aren’t content with free streaming acting as a means to attract subscribers.
Goldman Sachs actually beat Stringer to the idea of charging for ad-supported music streaming. In the latest Music in the Air report released in early May, its analysts recommended an “advertising light tier for a small charge” as one way of evolving the ad-supported marketplace and floated the idea of using “content or feature restrictions” to make free, ad-supported streaming tiers a less attractive option, thereby pushing free users to a paid tier.
Concerns about free streaming carry over to short-form video platforms such as TikTok. While TikTok is a powerful promotional vehicle, the royalties it generates for rights holders and creators isn’t commensurate with the time people spend on the app. As Stringer said this week, short-form video platforms “are primary consumption sources and they need to be valued accordingly.”
Free options have their place in the marketplace. After all, not everybody is willing or able to pay for a premium service. Mass market products like broadcast radio exist because they are free to the end user. But free music could come under pressure in the coming years. And between additional price increases and possible superfan tiers, combined with overall weakness in ad-supported streaming, subscriptions are poised to command an even larger share of the industry.
Superfans have become an very buzzy topic within the industry since last summer, when Goldman Sachs projected that this segment of fans could put more than $4 billion into the music industry by 2030.
As previously reported by Billboard, in January Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl called for “stok[ing] the blue flames of superfans” and additional “direct artist-superfan products and experiences”, while Universal Music Group CEO Lucian Grainge highlighted the value of “superfan experiences and products”; and Spotify hinted at future “superfan clubs” in a blog post.”
Defined by Luminate as listeners who “engage with artists and their content in five-plus different ways” superfans were a topic of conversation at IMS Ibiza 2024, which last week brought hundreds of electronic music industry figures to the island for three days of panels and parties.
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On Friday (April 26), programming included a conversation on superfans presented by industry knowledge platform Music Ally. The talk featured Evie Thomas of Atlantic Records and Warner Music Group UK, Jack Bridges of SoundCloud, Myradh Cormican of U.K. management company Frame Artists and was moderated by Marlen Hüllbrock of Music Ally.
The conversation cited statistics from Music Ally which found that superfans spend 80% more on music each month than the average listener and that 2% of an artist’s monthly listeners on Spotify account for more than half of that artist’s monthly merchandise purchases.
Additionally, superfans are 54% more likely to be the first among their friends to discover new music and new artists, and superfans are 59% more likely to say they want to connect with an artist on a personal level. Around 15-20% of all music listeners consider themselves superfans.
These are five other takeaways from the talk.
1) Even 100 Superfans Can Successfully Launch a Campaign — If You Can Find Them
Fanbases are spread across myriad platforms, which makes it challenging for artists to understand who their fans are. This is particularly true because given that data is segmented and also often controlled by third parties, meaning that artists have no direct access to fans and must rely on different tools and platforms to figure out who their superfans are.
Music Ally’s Hüllbrock noted that it’s “incredibly important” for artists and labels to figure out how to directly speak to their own fans, “because they’re battling the algorithm if they’re just posting on their own channels.” One solution here is cutting through the content clutter by taking artist/fan conversations to more more closed and direct spaces like WhatsApp and Discord.
“It’s about how to cut through the noise in an authentic way but also a relative way so even if an artist has 10,000 fans, they’re reaching a 1,000 or even 100 to successfully launch a campaign,” added Bridges. Thomas noted that it’s key for teams to test to see what different platforms are working and where engagement is happening for each particular artist, “as it’s not one size fits all; every artist is different; every community is different.”
2) Soundcloud Has Long Been a Home For Superfans
“I think there’s also been an underestimation of how much the superfans mattered before they were being properly identified,” said Bridges, citing the 2022 hit “Afraid To Feel” by U.K. duo LF System. That song “went to No. 1 but lived on Soundcloud for nearly a year before it got picked up and signed,” he added. “When that got signed and as part of the release strategy, it came off of Soundcloud, and straightaway the artists were inundated with messages every day asking where the record had gone.”
Bridges cites this as a moment “where the labels, the artists, the artist managers really realized how important it was to not mess with certain things or go to market without certain platforms.”
He says that over the last 18 months, as the industry has sharply focused on superfans, there’s been a change in strategy that’s seen “a lot more artists and labels go to Soundcloud early… and build records from nothing and by artists messaging their fans directly, because we have the tools to do that.”
3) Strategy Is Not One Size Fits All
“You have to look at how much time you have to invest, the reward you have made for your fanbase and where your fans really messaging you and commenting and which platforms are you seeing that on,” said Thomas, adding that ones those factors are sorted, the process can be very bespoke. “Maybe for a bigger artist with bigger budget,” she continued, “you can do something like Discord where you can bring in agencies and there’s a lot of paid features.” Meanwhile for artists that want a simpler solution, “something as simple as a WhatsApp group can be amazing.”
Cormican of Frame Artists cited Scottish DJ Arielle Free as a success story in terms of using WhatsApp to connect with superfans. “It’s been an easy lift thing to do, we’ve just given it space to develop,” she said, noting that the conversation in the group is often about topics beyond music and that many fans from the group meet IRL to attend Free’s shows.
The panelists also agreed that an artist’s language and tone should be tailored based on what platform they’re using and what fan group they’re talking to. On WhatsApp, the artist will likely be more open and relaxed, whereas Instagram caption will be shorter and sharper. Overall, the key is creating different spaces for different fan types.
4) Filtering Superfans By Territory Is Effective
When data is used to separate superfans by location, artists can easily reward these people with special experiences — meet and greets, guest lists, etc. — when they come to town.
Thomas cited Atlantic Records artist Fred again..’s March tour of Australia, for which the team cross-referenced people that were in the artist’s Australian fan community and anyone who had their birthday on the day of one of the Australia shows. The team then DM’d these fans from the Fred again.. account saying that they’d been put on the guestlist +2 for their birthday.
“That’s such a unique experience,” said Thomas, “I think it really heightens the user experience of that fan.” In terms of longterm benefits, she compared it to receiving a surprise upgrade by an airline: “You’re going to want to fly with that airline again.”
5) Bring Superfans Into The Narrative
When coordinating Chase & Status‘ 2023 Boiler Room set, their management at Frame Artists told organizers they wanted a small guest list dedicated to superfans “because,” said Cormican, “we wanted to have their energy in the room.”
This guestlist offer was distributed via the U.K. duo’s Discord channel. When the recording of this set was made live, there were a few people in the crowd who knew every lyric, danced the entire time and never once looked at their phones: the superfans who’d gotten in on the Discord guestlist.
The team from Frame Artists then messaged one of these fans, Don Lemons, and had him take part in a merchandise campaign. (And offered him “free guest list for life, obviously,” said Cormican.) When Chase & Status performed at the 2024 Brit Awards, fans from the artists’ Discord were invited to be part of the performance, as the team “wanted real ravers onstage.” This group got to take part in show rehearsals and the live show, and a video clip of this performance is now Chase & Status’ highest performing piece of content ever, with 100 million views. The video includes Dom Lemons “who,” said Cormican, “is now a legend in our scene.”
A time-tested revenue model in the theater and concert world is to price the front seats highest, and sell them early to the act’s dedicated followers, then fill out the house with cheap seats to optimize cash flow and lower risk. Recorded music does the opposite: when an album drops, an artist’s music is immediately available on all streaming services to every subscriber, leaving no room for passionate fans to self-select into pricier options.
In gaming, at least since the days of Minecraft, superfans have been given early access to titles prior to their publication, generating revenue, feedback and word of mouth.
Movie studios use a similar model, charging for early access to cinema screenings of major films roughly 45 days before they are widely available to stream (typically first as a purchase, then as a rental). Apple used this windowed approach seeking to maximize revenue with Killers of the Flower Moon and Napoleon, as did Amazon Prime with Air.
The record industry seems to have missed the memo. Other than an early misfire trying out streaming exclusives on the artist-owned Tidal service, it doesn’t use a windowed approach. This is a huge missed opportunity.
One way for recorded music to open a more lucrative, superfan-based future is to turn to one of the icons of its past: vinyl records. Rapper Travis Scott figured this out, pressing 500,000 double-vinyl records of his Utopia album and making it available the same day he dropped it on streaming services. Scott has now sold the majority of them at $50 a pop, taking the risk, and reaping the reward. What if he had released those analog vinyl records before the album was launched digitally on streaming? If he had sold half the stock before the digital release, he would have grossed $12.5 million, perhaps banking $10 million of that as profit, all while supercharging his marketing machine as all those superfans paraded their prized product to their friends.
A limited-edition package of Scott’s Utopia on red vinyl.
Courtesy of Cactus Jack Records
Like the boy who cried wolf, we’ve been told again and again that the resurgence in vinyl is a blip, not a trend. Yet for 18 straight years it has continued to surpass expectations. For the past three years, it’s made up over a tenth of all label revenues from the consumer and this year will see labels reap over a billion vinyl dollars, with no slowdown in sight.
Analog is surging in book publishing, too, as printed books are now outselling their digital counterparts 4-to-1 and bookstores are ascending. Not long ago that would have seemed inconceivable.
Now let’s look at where the vinyl meets the road: the math. While streaming is a music industry success story, it’s also a commoditization story – selling more and more for less and less. Back in 2001, Rhapsody charged $9.99 to access 15,000 catalog songs; today Spotify et al charge roughly the same for 120 million songs. Add the impact of family plan, where typically three people share a $15 per month account and the value of an account user has fallen by 10% and that’s before you adjust for inflation. Vinyl is bucking this trend. Since 2016, retail prices for the platters that matter have risen 30%.
Will Page
Anjelica Bette Fellini
For a streamer to provide a record label the same amount of value from an album as a vinyl buyer, a customer would need to press play over 5,000 times — or stream for almost two weeks straight without sleep. Let’s be crystal clear on what this comparison really means: consumers are paying more for the same with vinyl but paying less to access more with streaming. So if you want to hedge your intellectual property bets, you’d better put some chips on black and spin the wheel at 33 1⁄3.
Management guru Peter Drucker once quipped that “the customer rarely buys what the company thinks it’s selling him.” In the case of vinyl, over half of buyers don’t even own a record player. So they’re not buying the music — they’re buying merchandise that gives them a sense of identity and connection to the artist. With streaming, you merely press your thumb on a piece of glass; owning, holding and displaying a curated vinyl record with unique artwork has much deeper meaning to a fan.
There are similar conundrums concerning vinyl’s relationship with the creator. Remember that streaming unbundled the album – so you could have nine filler songs on a killer Number One record yet not get paid for those songs. The book Pivot showed that Gotye’s 2011 debut Making Mirrors was the most streamed album of the year, but it was all down to one hit: Somebody I Used to Know. Strip that hit out and this record falls out of the Top 100.
Vinyl captures more in the unit value — no fan can realistically give your album $30 via streaming — and all songs receive the same payout. Saturday Night Fever soundtrack is arguably the greatest vinyl success story in history; yet the obscure Ralph MacDonald track “Calypso Breakdown” from that album earned the same as the Bee Gees signature track “Staying Alive” for every album sold. Investors in music catalogs should take note: supporting more vinyl releases stands to monetize the vast majority of songs currently owned that make almost no money from streaming.
Vinyl is not without its challenges. Measuring the size of its remarkable continued success story is just one. Recent changes by Luminate, the go-to source for industry data, wiped off 40% of the measured volume overnight, by flipping from extrapolating the size of the market to counting only those who opt in. That’s getting fixed, and will assuage the people it’s upset, but the point remains, there’s way more vinyl being purchased than Luminate measures.
Fred Goldring
Natasha Fradkin
There are other challenges, too. If counting bricks & mortar retail is hard, what about tracking online physical retail that’s based anywhere yet serves everywhere? London-based Juno is a corner kick from Camden’s famous market and serves not just the UK and US, but Brazil and China in equal measure. Add the burgeoning second-hand platforms like Discogs and you get a sense that the true size of the market is a lot bigger than we give it credit for.
This brings us back to the potential of vinyl’s first mover advantage. Until the latter part of 2023, vinyl faced an enormous manufacturing backlog and demand far exceeded supply for even the biggest artists. Many vinyl albums were released many months after their initial streaming release.
A rise of small vinyl manufacturing plants have significantly decreased lag time and backlog. Travis Scott used the Poland-based team at Pressing Business to manufacture 500,000 double-disc, multi-cover, multi-colored Utopia albums in just five weeks, allowing for the highest vinyl debut for a hip-hop artist since records began in 1991. Combined with streaming, the album stayed at #1 for five weeks.
The record industry should start selling and delivering vinyl as an early access opportunity, not an afterthought. Pre-stream vinyl releases can create scarcity, exclusivity and therefore additional revenue from superfans who will jump at the chance to be the first to hear the music or own a limited edition version. Artists will benefit creatively as well, as superfans are the ones most likely to truly appreciate the album as a body of work, curated as the artist intended (and, many would argue, with better sound). Once music is thrown into the ocean of streaming, it often gets lost at sea, and all stakeholders lose something valuable. It’s time for the record industry to embrace the vinyl first mover advantage that is hiding in plain sight.
Will Page is the author of Pivot and former chief economist of Spotify, and Fred Goldring is an Entrepreneur, Entertainment Lawyer and co-founder of Pressing Business.
As growth slows in large, developed markets, music companies are looking elsewhere for opportunities. Increasingly, companies are targeting superfans, the most fervent and high-spending of music consumers, to provide those revenue gains.
The Pareto Principle says that roughly 20% of customers provide 80% of a company’s revenue. Whatever the breakdown, music companies are expecting more from a small subset of big spenders. Concert promoter Live Nation wants premium offerings such as VIP boxes to increase to 30% to 35% of its amphitheater business from the current 9%, president/CEO Michael Rapino told investors during the company’s Feb. 22 earnings call. Earlier this year, the heads of Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group revealed their desire to offer new types of services and products for the most fervent of music fans.
Coming out of the pandemic, people — especially younger consumers — spent money “as a way to make up for lost time” and, later, to cope with stress, Intuit Credit Karma, a financial management platform, explained. Consulting firm McKinsey & Company calls this behavior “selective splurging.” According to a November 2023 global survey by McKinsey, 20% of all consumers planned to splurge on out-of-home entertainment such as concerts — less than restaurants (38%), apparel (34%) and travel (28%).
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More than two in five Gen Z consumers (42%) spent more on live concerts than before the pandemic, according to a September 2023 survey by Qualtrics on behalf of Intuit Credit Karma. That was well above Millennials (34%), Gen X (19%) and Baby Boomers (11%). Last year, music fans paid high prices to see the two biggest cultural events: tours by Taylor Swift and Beyonce. Fittingly, Swift’s The Eras Tour was sponsored by Capital One, and some fans signed up for their first credit card as a result.
A couple of years after pandemic restrictions ended, though, consumers have a spending hangover and seem less willing to reach deeper into their pockets. Ample data suggest that consumers are increasingly stressed from high prices — U.S. inflation rose to 3.5% in March from 3.2% in February — and the ending of pandemic-era forbearances that allowed people to put off payments on their mortgages and student loans.
Splurging has given way to focusing on the basics. Consumers intend to spend more than usual on essentials such as gasoline, groceries, produce and pet food, as well as health and fitness, in the next three months, according to a McKinsey survey in February. In contrast, consumers intend to spend less on discretionary items: entertainment, domestic flights, hotel and resort stays, home improvement and alcoholic beverages. Luxuries such as jewelry, furniture and home decorations have the biggest gap between spenders and savers.
Rising debt is one reason consumers are pulling back on spending. In the United States, the ratio of credit cards and auto loans becoming past due by 90 days or more exceeds pre-pandemic levels. Delinquency rates are especially bad for younger consumers who are most likely to spend money on concerts and entertainment. In the fourth quarter of 2023, the Gen Z delinquency transition rate — transitioning into delinquency — reached 11.86% compared to 8.53% in the fourth quarter of 2021, according to the New York Federal Reserve. Millennials’ delinquency transition rate rose to 9.56% from 6.53% two years earlier. Gen X and Baby Boomers’ delinquencies are also trending up but faring better (7.01% and 4.78%, respectively).
For many young consumers who have taken on debt, 2024 will be a year to pull back. A third of Millennials and Gen Z say they have a shopping addiction, according to a survey by Qualtrics for Intuit Credit Karma conducted in February and March of this year. About three-quarters of Millennials and Gen Z surveyed by Qualtrics say they plan to change how they spend money. A full 20% of them said 2024 will be a “no buy year,” a recent trend where people swear off spending except to replace items, and 56% said they will have a “low buy year,” meaning they will reduce shopping significantly.
Credit card debt is nothing new, though, and some experts believe consumers can take it in stride. Although credit card balances increased in 2023, consumers “largely still have the wherewithal to repay their existing obligations,” according to credit monitoring service Experian. In fact, the average FICO credit score improved to 715 in 2023 from 714 in 2022 despite the average credit card balance increasing 10%. In February, credit ratings agency Fitch revised its forecast for U.S. real (adjusted for inflation) consumer spending to 1.3% from 0.6%, largely on the belief that consumers will draw down savings throughout the year.
High-priced concert tickets and experiences might be out of the question, but superfan spending is also more mundane. Artists routinely put out new albums with multiple CD and vinyl LP variants knowing that their most hardcore fans consider them to be collectibles (and purchase them to help their favorite artists top the charts). Swift’s 2022 album Midnights had 20 different versions across all physical formats. Those album sales accounted for 1.14 million of the 1.58 million units sold in its first week of release. At $20 or $30 apiece, supporting a favorite artist doesn’t require going into debt.
Music isn’t a necessity like food and shelter, but it’s proved to be both recession-proof and pandemic-proof. Regardless of the rises and falls in consumer sentiment, inflation rates and unemployment trends, people will spend money on music. But the broader trends around consumer spending may mean that the growth the music business hopes to reap from those superfans may not be as lucrative, at least for now, as they may have hoped.
For the past decade, on-demand streaming drove incredible gains in recorded music revenue, which climbed from $6.7 billion in 2014 to $17.1 billion last year in the U.S. alone. Now there’s only so much room for growth in the U.S. and Europe, and developing markets aren’t as predictable. But look, up in the sky, it’s a nerd, who could help an artist buy a plane, it’s SUPERFANS!
Basically, now that the music business takes in a modest amount of money from an enormous number of people, it needs to find ways to also capture much larger amounts of money from smaller numbers of more dedicated fans. A July 2023 Goldman Sachs report said there was a $4.2 billion “addressable market opportunity for superfan monetization,” and Billboard just reported on how this same excitement is sweeping labels — as well as some of the challenges they will face. Of course, this is just an MBA’s way of saying what most fans already know: They want to buy more from their favorite acts than access to their music on a streaming service. The question — besides who actually qualifies as a superfan! — is how to find them and what they want.
To get sense of what this business might look like, let’s look at the iconic group that pioneered one kind of superfan model, as well as newer stars that have turned a very different model into something of a science: the Grateful Dead and K-pop groups. Both are very popular — phenomenally so by some measures — but neither is exactly mainstream in the way that Taylor Swift or Beyoncé is. Their popularity is deeper than it is wide. Neither the Dead nor K-pop is for everyone — both tend to inspire either devotion or disdain — but the fans who like them tend to go all-in.
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Those fans help these acts overperform by different measures. The Dead only ever had one hit single, but the band had the highest-grossing tours in 1991 and 1993, partly thanks to hardcore Deadheads who saw multiple shows, and the 2023 Dead & Company tour grossed as much ($114.7 million) as the last BTS tour ($113.6 million), according to Billboard Boxscore. K-pop acts dominate the sales market. In 2023, K-pop acts had seven of the top-selling CDs in the U.S., three of the top-selling albums, and none of the top albums by total consumption, once streaming was included. On a relative basis compared to other acts, their fans buy more than they listen — a great business considering that many of those buyers probably listen to those albums on streaming services as well. (K-pop is far more popular internationally.)
Both the Dead and the K-pop groups essentially doubled-down on what they do well in order to super-serve their fans. The Dead built its reputation as an improvisational live act, the best in popular music, and it never completely captured that same magic in the studio. So after the group broke up in 1995, it started to release more live recordings, and a 2006 deal with Rhino led to increasingly-ambitious reissue projects — a 73-CD set of the 1972 European tour, a series of reissues available every quarter on a subscription-first basis, and an 80-CD set of one show from each year of the band’s 30-year career. Recently the group broke a record for having the most albums on the top 40 spots in the Billboard 200. This undercounts their business success, though, since some of the box sets Rhino releases sell for more than $100.
K-pop acts tend to focus on selling merchandise, and given the declining number of CD players, many young fans probably see CDs as more of a souvenir than a way to listen to music. K-pop is all about fandom — having it, displaying it, and in some cases arguing about it — so those acts tend to sell merchandise that appeals to a collector’s mentality. (I find it odd that some fans buy CDs in different colors, but I probably have a dozen live versions of the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star,” and some people find that a bit much, too.) K-pop fans spend a considerable amount of money on merchandise — $24 a month, according to research from Luminate, which is 140% more than the average U.S. listener. From a financial perspective, K-pop acts are basically in the tchotchke business; BTS sells clothes, jewelry and even Uno cards. And while the Dead sells more than its share of merchandise, including “drinkware” and “home goods,” it has always really been a live band, in both art and business terms.
The music industry tends to see these business models as exceptions, since it’s dominated by labels that are very much in the recorded music business. But they might also offer inspiration on how to turn a star-level audience into a superstar-level career. (The Dead’s business, which is still overseen by Warner Music’s Rhino, also shows that many superfans don’t fade away — I saw a few concerts in 1991, and I plan to buy the next vinyl box set, too.) Charts change much faster than loyalties.
What can the rest of the business learn from these successes? Most important, that it’s both possible and potentially difficult to monetize superfans — they’re willing to spend money, but only on the right items; BTS live recordings might not do as well as an expanded clothing line. And that requires expertise. Rhino president Mark Pinkus works closely with the Dead, as does archivist Dave Lemieux. They choose the shows fans want to hear and know which to sell as part of the Dave’s Picks reissue series and which belong in box sets. K-pop fans are enthusiastic, but also demanding — they want to buy branded hoodies, but only if they’re designed the right way.
Selling streaming subscriptions to a mass audience requires executives who could focus on the mainstream. Getting part of that audience to spend twice that much money on a single act is certainly possible — but it takes a different skill entirely.
They love artists, they’ve got money to burn, and they’re the music industry’s new obsession: Say hello to superfans.
In January alone, Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl called for “stok[ing] the blue flames of superfans” and additional “direct artist-superfan products and experiences”; Universal Music Group CEO Lucian Grainge highlighted the value of “superfan experiences and products”; and Spotify hinted at future “superfan clubs” in a blog post.
The following month, leaders at Interscope and Live Nation shouted out superfans. That was all before Joon Choi, president of the Korean fan platform Weverse, one-upped everyone by telling Music Business Worldwide that “the potential for growth in the superfan business and economy is limitless.” Stoke those blue flames right, and they’ll never stop burning.
All this runaway enthusiasm about superfans “goes back to that Goldman Sachs article,” says Mike Biggane, a former UMG executive and founder of Big Effect, which is developing technology designed to help smaller artist teams. Last summer, the financial institution posited that superfans — Luminate defines this group as listeners who “engage with artists and their content in five-plus different ways” — could inject more than $4 billion into the music industry by 2030.
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Goldman’s report also noted that the music business struggles “to fully monetize its content.” Nearly everyone listens to music, but the industry’s value pales next to that of gaming, for example. Games “have been more agile in terms of innovating and adopting ways to generate new revenue streams,” says Ben Sumner, managing director at Feel for Music, which helps games and brands with music supervision.
But for labels and streaming services, collecting new revenue from superfans may be easier said than done. “People are trying to find a simple way to mine fandom,” says Mike Pelczynski, one of the architects of SoundCloud’s “fan-powered royalties,” a payout system that aligns streaming revenue more closely with fandom. “It’s good for investors to hear, but it’s not simple. Every platform is different.”
Not only that: “So much of the conversation is about how to extract more out of the superfan, which I think is a big mistake,” says Bernie Cahill, founding partner of Activist Artists Management. “If you take care of them, you will get far more value out of that relationship than you will by selling them another piece of vinyl or a T-shirt.”
Pelczynski believes that “superfans want to be closer to, and most importantly seen by, their favorite artist.” They also clearly gain from their connections with like-minded enthusiasts — working together to orchestrate fundraising campaigns to support the acts they love, for example. Luminate found that superfans are 43% more likely than the average listener to say they “like to participate in the community” that springs up around an act.
These communities are defined by artist-to-fan and fan-to-fan relationships. It’s not immediately clear where labels can squeeze in.
And it’s notable that, historically, labels actually excel at reaching passive fans. A record label is unmatched when it comes to taking a song that’s connecting with audiences in one space and making it so ubiquitous that it becomes inescapable, the kind of thing that casual listeners run into at the gym and the supermarket. “We can reach Fall Out Boy‘s superfans pretty easily,” says Jonathan Daniel, co-founder of Crush Management (FOB, Miley Cyrus, Lorde and others). “When they have a song that raises its hand above the superfans, different opportunities come for them, and that’s where you really need the label — they’re great at taking it really wide.”
What’s more, in an age of artist empowerment, it’s hard to imagine many acts ceding control of their superfan communities to record companies. “Smart artists really curate a direct connection themselves,” Cahill says — they know their diehard followers keep them afloat. (It’s jarring to hear executives say things like “fandom is the future,” as if it wasn’t also the past.)
These days, due to the fact that artists can record, distribute and market themselves all on the cheap, they usually amass a dedicated following before they even sign to a label. This tends to give them a lot of sway in contract negotiations, and as a result, 360 deals — where labels take a share of the money that artists make from touring and merchandise sales, for example — are out of favor with young managers and lawyers, limiting record companies’ ability to cash in on superfans’ passion.
Nonetheless, to the extent that labels can encourage superfans to stream more or buy additional vinyl variants, they stand to gain financially. All the major labels also own merch companies, so if they can stoke demand for t-shirts that are subsequently manufactured by their own outlets, that’s another win. And UMG recently invested in Weverse and NTWRK’s acquisition of Complex, allowing it to benefit indirectly from superfandom.
Warner has another plan altogether: In February, Kyncl said that he’s “assembled a team of incredible technology talent” to construct “an app where artists can connect directly with their superfans.” While he hasn’t shared any additional details on what this will look like, users would presumably only have access to Warner artists on a Warner superfan platform. However, most listeners probably also want to connect with some acts signed elsewhere, to the extent they even know what labels their favorite artists are signed to.
The other hurdle for new superfan apps, or streaming platforms trying to add new superfan features, is all the existing options: The majority of artists already try to interact with their most passionate fans on TikTok, Instagram, Discord, Reddit and more. As a result, “artists’ time is very scarce,” says Roneil Rumburg, co-founder and CEO at Audius, a blockchain-based streaming service which enabled direct payments from fans to artists last year.
If more streamers try rolling out superfan features — SoundCloud, for example, allowed acts to message their top fans last year — then artists’ time will be crunched even further, as each platform will presumably require a different approach to engagement. In fact, Kyncl used exactly this reasoning to justify Warner’s venture into platform building. Artists “don’t want to optimize just for one platform over another,” he said.
“The few companies that are trying to build their own ecosystems, I applaud it,” Pelczynski says. However, “I think it’s going to be very challenging to make something that people will be willing to spend their time on and add to their daily usual behaviors.”
Like labels, the most prominent streaming services have spent a lot of time in the past decade figuring out how to serve music up to passive fans. (Spotify once had a messaging system, but it was discontinued in 2017 due to “very low engagement.”) They have had success using various recommendation methods — editorial playlists, algorithmic playlists — to ensure that people keep listening.
But a new generation of listeners appears less interested in throwing an editorial playlist on in the background. Younger, more engaged fans like to slow down their favorite artist’s track, mash it up, or duet with it, leading to the proliferation of homemade re-works across social media platforms.
“For the first time ever, an artist can put a song out and it might be a fan-created flavor of it that connects,” says Gaurav Sharma, founder of Hook, a platform that helps rightsholders monetize user-generated remixes. “Community is being built around music on social media, and fan remixing is a way to be unique in that expression.” It may be hard for major streaming services to cater to this type of fandom, though, due to rights issues: Labels probably aren’t going to condone unauthorized remixes on prominent music streamers. (This is the problem Hook is trying to solve.)
There has also been speculation around the industry about streaming services charging superfans extra for early access to music, a tactic that calls back to the exclusive album windows of a decade ago. That said, “fans expect a LOT of value to justify a monthly fee, especially with subscription fatigue,” according to a recent (subsequently deleted) tweet from Emily White, a former Spotify and Billboard employee whose “team was exploring artist fan clubs.”
Still, despite all the potential obstacles, “We’re seeing a lot of momentum on the institutional music side to figure this out and do it quickly,” Rumburg says, before adding a note of caution: “When so many hopes and dreams get injected into one word or concept, there’s no way it ever lives up to the hype.”
When Megan Thee Stallion released her single “Hiss” on Jan. 26, she let the music do the talking, with two exceptions: On Jan. 30, she appeared on Good Morning America, the top-rated network morning show. Then, on Feb. 1, she logged on to social-audio platform Stationhead to speak directly to her most dedicated supporters.
“Let me tell y’all something — if ‘Hiss’ hits No. 1, I’m having an OG ratchet-ass Hottie party,” she said on the HottieRanch fan channel, laughing along as two of her longtime fans hosted an off-the-cuff conversation with her. “[My first single] ‘Cobra’ and ‘Hiss’ are the first two music videos that I’ve done since I’ve been off of my labels, and I did this shit because I finally had full creative range. I could do whatever I wanted to do,” she declared. “I’m just happy that [people are] appreciating the art, because I really thought about it and put my all into it. And I’m just happy to be here, today — the Hotties are gagging!”
During the 14 minutes that Megan spent on HottieRanch, 7,000 fans logged on to the channel, racking up 3,000 song downloads through the site and flooding the comments with her signature snake emojis and messages of support. Fireworks effects and alerts about sales milestones and other benchmarks flew across the app’s interface, and “Hiss” later debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — Megan’s first-ever solo chart‑topper. According to Stationhead, its users contributed 13,200 download sales and millions of global streams to the track’s debut, and the benefits did not end there. The song’s withering lyrics — which target Nicki Minaj, Tory Lanez and other artists — led Minaj to hop on her own Barbz channel on Stationhead to clap back during an extended dialogue with her fans. Her own dis track, “Big Foot,” followed, leading to a back-and-forth that boosted streams for Minaj’s and Megan’s songs — and to Stationhead trending on X as the two MCs and their fans traded darts.
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It’s one of the latest examples of Stationhead’s growing popularity with artists who want to foster strong connections to their fans and boost streams and chart positions in the process. In recent months, Olivia Rodrigo, Cardi B, BTS, Blackpink, Ed Sheeran, Jennifer Lopez, Coldplay, GAYLE and other acts have engaged with fans on the platform — which focuses exclusively on music — playing songs, telling stories and answering questions while thousands listen along.
“Stationhead is incorporated in every single and album release that we do,” says Kirsten Stubbs, co-head of pop/rock digital at Interscope Geffen A&M (IGA), who has run campaigns with Rodrigo and Selena Gomez on the platform and says she first discovered it after hearing about it from fans themselves. “It’s an app that the industry was looking for for a long time, and they were the first ones to really nail that strategy.”
“Your fans on Stationhead are like your season ticket holders at a sporting event: You can build a plan around them, count on them to show up to things,” says TMWRK founder and CEO Andrew McInness, whose company manages Diplo and Dillon Francis, among others, and who serves on Stationhead’s board. “Those types of fans are the reason why Taylor Swift is Taylor Swift, why Nicki Minaj has her power base or the various HYBE or K-pop artists have this big support system.”
The platform, which debuted in 2017, functions much like a digital pirate radio station, where anyone with a streaming music account can host their own station and play music, with other users able to log on and listen, chat and even call in and speak to the DJ. And since the app functions as a skin over Spotify or Apple Music, each listener in a room counts as an individual stream.
Over the years, Stationhead has evolved into a destination for fan groups to discuss (whether through the chat or a podcast-like audio function) their favorite artists with the channel’s host. These virtual connections sometimes lead to in-real-life relationships with, for instance, channel members meeting at music venues to see concerts together. The addition of channels — rooms created specifically for fans of certain artists, such as Minaj, Jimin or Stray Kids — in January 2023 solidified the app’s new direction and led to Cardi and Rodrigo discovering the app through their fans and occasionally joining them. According to the company, there are now more than 1,000 channels.
“Music’s future is leaning into fandom, period, and fandoms live here,” says Stationhead co-founder Ryan Star. “They played the instrument we built better than anybody.”
The platform’s role in fostering the artist-fan connection — and helping to deliver hits — comes at a time when “superfan” is arguably the industry’s biggest buzzword. In his New Year’s memo to staff, Universal Music Group (UMG) chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge wrote that in 2024, the label group will focus on “grow[ing] the pie for all artists by strengthening the artist-fan relationship through superfan experiences and products.”
Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl also cited superfans in his holiday letter to staff, calling them “relatively untapped and undermonetized.” Two months later, during a panel discussion at the Web Summit conference in Doha, Qatar, Kyncl mentioned that WMG had hired a team of engineers to help the company build its own superfan operation, with an emphasis on “a cross-platform solution,” which he said at a later appearance that he felt labels were better positioned than anyone to do.
Stationhead and WMG aren’t alone in the superfan space; HYBE’s WeVerse and companies like Medallion and Fave are attempting to address different aspects of superfan monetization, with various levels of success. UMG invested in NTWRK’s $109 million acquisition of Complex in February, and Live Nation, Spotify and others have also expressed an interest in or begun to explore ways to enter the superfan space. Last year, a Goldman Sachs report estimated that there will be a $4.2 billion addressable market for superfan monetization by 2030, and Luminate reported that superfans spend 80% more on their favorite artists than the regular music listener.
But Stationhead has gone further than many others in terms of bringing more revenue into the business by focusing on the one thing at its center: the music. “Stationhead is a good example of a company that is creating the bridge between the main lane of how someone makes money — whether that be a rights holder, artist or roster — and people who are avid listeners or supporters who are exhibiting fan affinity,” says Mike Pelczynski, a strategist who helped build SoundCloud’s direct-to-fan capabilities and pioneered its fan-powered business. “They know you still need to make money based on scale and volume of plays, and they’re creating hyper communities that help, literally, stream music in groups, but then also give [artists] the capability to tap into those people, and then to give them something else, like merch or other purchase [options].”
Before he began developing Stationhead in 2014, Star released albums and performed in the band Stage and as a solo artist. He says that whenever he opened for such acts as the Goo Goo Dolls or O.A.R., he made a point of meeting fans at the merchandise booth afterward — even when the headliners would roll their eyes.
“I think right now [fandom] is still a buzzword, and I hear a lot of people throw it around, and they don’t really know it,” he says. “I know it from the days of actually being an artist that relied on those kinds of fans for my life. For me, I was like, ‘These are the people who are gonna be there for me no matter what.’”
SB19 fans who met on Stationhead at the Filipino boy band’s concert at Araneta Coliseum in Manila in 2022.
Courtesy SB19 Stationhead Team
On a Wednesday afternoon in early March, 3,700 people were logged on to Stationhead’s BTS ARMY Jungkook channel; 3,500 were tuned in to the BTS ARMY channel dedicated to V; 1,200 people were on the ONCE channel for fans of TWICE; 1,300 were on the STAYS channel for fans of Stray Kids; and 800 people were on the BardiGang channel dedicated to Cardi B fans. The Beyhive channel, which Beyoncé has never visited, had 150 listeners, with the host dutifully streaming “Texas Hold ’Em” every three songs. Stationhead says it drove 15% of first-week downloads for the song when it debuted at No. 1 on the Hot 100.
During the pandemic, social audio apps like Clubhouse, Spotify’s Greenroom/Live and Amazon’s AMP live radio app began to pop up, sometimes attracting star names to host conversations or live podcast shows on their platforms. But those big names — occasionally brought in with big checks — were often what attracted audiences, and investors, to the platforms. (Last year, both Amazon and Spotify shut down their platforms, and Clubhouse laid off half its workforce.) Stationhead grew on the opposite side of the spectrum: the company says it has never paid for marketing, or for an artist to appear on the platform. Instead, artists and labels who have embraced it heard about it through the fans themselves, and Stationhead says that 95% of the billions of streams it facilitated in 2023 came when there were no artists on the platform, just fans hanging out amongst themselves.
It’s something that speaks even to the biggest artists in the world. “It’s a good way to get thousands, tens of thousands of people to all come together and have an amazing experience together. And with great examples, artists jump in, and then that turns into content because people record that kind of stuff and it travels beyond the platform onto Instagram or TikTok,” says Atlantic general manager Paul Sinclar, who has worked Stationhead into rollouts with Ed Sheeran, Melanie Martinez, Charlie Puth and the Barbie soundtrack, among others. And the experience goes well beyond just boosting a song’s streams or downloads — true, die hard fans are created through more than just commercial interactions. “If you get an audience together that wants something special and cool to them in that moment, there’s an opportunity. But we try to measure it by, did fans think that was an amazing experience?”
When Sheeran released his Autumn Variations album last September, his fans were having a listening party on Stationhead — and Sheeran randomly crashed the party, with no heads up. When GAYLE was launching her tour, she held a contest on Stationhead for her fans to guess her set lists, which became a nightly listening party and debate, culminating with GAYLE herself jumping in to confirm the set list and update a playlist for her fans. For the release of the Barbie soundtrack, Atlantic facilitated a 12-hour listening party, with a different fan each hour hosting their own playlist based on a different song and artist that appeared on the album. For the two year anniversary of Rodrigo’s SOUR album, she popped in to a listening party her fans were holding, proving the power the platform has to boost catalog, too. “The spontaneity of logging in and not knowing who is gonna be in there, if the artist is gonna be in there, is a really cool experience,” Stubbs says.
Stationhead says that over the past year, its user base has quadrupled to more than 15 million fans, and the average user spends over two hours per day on the platform. The company claims it drove billions of streams and hundreds of thousands of downloads in the past year, creating tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue for labels and artists — an admittedly vague figure that it nonetheless expects to grow fivefold in the next year. (The company declined to reveal specifics.)
Stationhead’s revenue comes largely from a cut of the downloads sold through the platform — a format that IGA’s Stubbs says is “more important to the success of a song and album because downloads are weighted more” for chart algorithms.
Though its current business model is better suited to making money for streaming services and rights holders, Stationhead says that will change soon. “In the same way that Discord and Twitch created entirely new channels of revenue for the video game industry, Stationhead is doing the same with music,” co-founder and COO Murray Levison says. “We plan to continue to innovate in the space and roll out a number of monetization features over the course of the next year.”
Until then, Stationhead continues to do what it does best: serve as the destination for over 1,000 fandoms. “Stationhead is always on, and the community is always there even if nobody is talking,” Star says. “We’ve been building it quietly for years now, really focused on understanding the fans, learning them, validating them, giving them a home — all of this has happened. We found our audience, and this market is just beginning. And it’s going to be massive.”
A version of this story appeared in the March 30, 2024, issue of Billboard.