Over the past few months I've been working on articulating my concept of Fan Retention Management (FRM). I find that the hardest thing about writing is staring at the blank page. I don't suffer from writer's block, my mind just gets overloaded with ideas and I can't figure out where to start. When that happens, I often just close my eyes and start to type. In order to unlock my FRM concept, I started by writing out the history of the company my partner Terry and I started in 1998. So, in an effort to practice what I preach, here is the story I wrote mainly for myself, in raw form.
The History, The Story, and The Original Vision of Fanscape
In 1998 the idea for Fanscape was born.
Terry and I worked at A&M Records, we both ran Artist Development and I did A&R, our jobs were to help artists grow their small or non-existent fan bases.
We were music fans and we knew instinctively that if an artist made good music and could connect with their fans, the sky was the limit.
But starting from nothing was a massive challenge.
The Internet was still a new concept.
There were no social networks.
Few bands even had mailing lists.
So, we built them from scratch.
We did this at A&M for artists like the Gin Blossoms, Sheryl Crow, and MxPx.
We gave the bands 3x5 cards to sit at the merchandise counter that asked the fans to give us their addresses. The artists brought them back to us and we entered them into a spreadsheet database.
There was an artist on A&M named John Hiatt.
To date, John has put out 24 albums, 5 of those were on A&M.
Each album A&M put out had better production and built on the momentum of the previous album. But no matter what we did, John would sell 300,000 albums.
He would tour the country and sell 500 tickets everywhere he went with some larger pockets in the Midwest where he could sell 1,000 - 3,000 tickets.
Our instinct told us, if John knew and had access to all of those 300,000 people that bought every one of his albums and came to all of his shows, he wouldn’t need a record company. He could have a sustainable and very successful business. He could sell albums directly to those people and wouldn’t need to spend money trying to reach people who didn’t want to buy. He would know where to tour. He could create products (merchandise, events, exclusive experiences) for those fans.
Our instinct also told us, if John communicated with those fans, they’d feel close to him and do even more for him. They’d buy more stuff. They’d tell others about what a great guy he is and help him continue to grow his fan base. John would know where to play, what to play, and do more things that he had never thought to do.
John wasn’t our target artist, he was just the inspiration for an idea that we couldn’t help but build.
Fanscape was born.
The goal: know everything about the fan.
We each kicked in $5,000 to start our company and we began putting a plan together. We put an intern on the Vans Warped Tour to travel with the popular punk rock band, MxPx, and he came back with thousands of 3x5 cards that contained names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. We built a simple online database and we entered that information into it as quickly as we could. (It took us weeks) We sent all those fans thank you notes, gifts, and a printed newsletter where they could order merchandise and subscribe to a fan club. We were so inundated with responses and product orders that we were still fulfilling them months later.
Later in the year we made it easy for fans to enter their information directly into this database from the artists’ own websites.
No one else had done this yet.
By the end of the year, everyone was doing it.
We sold merchandise and subscription-based fan clubs.
We sent emails weekly and physical newsletters quarterly.
We had a simple goal, but a very big idea:
Know everything about the fans.
If we knew what people liked, what they bought, what they desired, what style and frequency of communication they preferred, etc., we could cater products and communications to them and make them feel heard and appreciated.
They’d love the band more and tell their friends.
We’d study the data.
We’d see what people bought.
For fans that bought red shirts, then we’d make red shirts just for those people. Available for one week and then when they were gone, they were gone.
We’d ask them questions.
What do they like?
What do they eat?
What else do they want to see from the band?
We knew where everyone lived. We could tell them the show was coming to their town. We could tell the agent where to book the show because we knew the fans were there.
None of this had been done yet.
There was a history of fan clubs and fan communities. But just from a handful of acts. We studied The Grateful Dead, Kiss, The Beatles, Pearl Jam, Metallica, and Dave Matthews. These were some of the few that actually fostered community. But there were millions of other artists who did not.
We wanted to surprise fans. To overdeliver. To make them feel special.
When they bought tickets, they’d be rewarded with a backstage pass.
When they bought t-shirts, we’d drop in hand-written notes and extra goodies.
The fans kept coming.
The bands kept coming.
Then the music industry woke up.
Napster was killing them.
Records weren’t selling. People were stealing the music.
The Internet became more relevant, but still an afterthought behind radio stations, record stores, television shows, and magazines.
We knew what was happening, but only a few at the record labels and management companies understood. They just saw profits plummet.
Record companies saw that there was power in the data and with access to one band's fans, they could market another band.
So they took that back from us.
They told the artists: we pay for everything, so the data is ours. Your website is ours. In fact, we want a piece of everything you do.
The 360 deal was born and suddenly if you wanted to be on a record label, you had to give up more than just your songs, you had to give up a piece of your touring, your t-shirts, your publishing, everything.
The musicians were powerless.
And eCommerce grew.
Amazon started selling more than books.
Companies created online stores to sell band’s t-shirts.
We had to pivot.
We became a marketing company and not a fan management company.
We had to survive.
Record companies started coming to us and paid us to market bands on the Internet.
This service had many names:
Grassroots Marketing
Street Marketing
Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Alternative Marketing
Below-the-Line Marketing
Until a few years later when it was rebranded as:
Social Media Marketing.
We were the first.
We found fan-sites and online fanzines that talked about bands and shared stories.
We ran “street teams”, a subset of super-fans that would call radio stations and request songs, call MTV’s TRL to ask for videos to be played, even put up flyers around town and schools.
We created password-protected websites with chat rooms and message boards to communicate activities, missions, and rewards.
We asked the bands to call in to personalized phone numbers and leave messages for fans. We asked them to tell stories from the road and thank their fans.
When they did, the fans went nuts.
Songs from punk rock and alternative bands moved up TRL to compete with pop acts.
Suddenly every label wanted our service.
Our clients went from niche bands to the biggest artists in the world.
We were riding high.
Then competition hit.
Suddenly there were other companies doing what we did. Lots of them.
We just upped our game and kept improving our services. We scaled slowly and hired young people who knew how to communicate to fans. We really cared about our clients, our team, the fans of the artists we worked with.
But we couldn’t survive the downturn of the music industry.
Record companies were our bread-and-butter. They couldn’t spend what they used to.
Our competition was cheaper.
Labels took it in house.
It was a race to the bottom.
And so we moved away from music into tours, films, television shows, and big brands.
The music business spent the next decade trying to fix what they’d broken.
We left music and moved on and had even more success with these more lucrative entities. Eventually we caught the attention of the big ad agencies and sold our company to Omnicom.
We spent 5 years helping brands learn what music had discovered first.
There are fans of brands too.
They are customers who want to rally around the brands they love.
But they want to be heard and respected.
They want better products, better service, more attention.
And social media became the norm, not the new.
Every company had to have it or face extinction.
And it turned into a big business with influencers and social celebrities earning millions on big platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twtiter, and now TikTok.
Along the way, the music business began to fix itself.
Streaming replaced album sales.
Touring income dwarfs recorded revenue.
And while music distribution and consumption methods have changed, people haven't stopped listening to music. No, now they listen to more.
It’s easier.
It’s more economical.
It’s a little more passive, but the market is bigger.
Music fans are customers.
Fans and customers alike want to be treated like people. Not sheep. Not numbers. They want to be heard. They want to know you care.
The vision for what we started in 1998 is still true today.
We didn’t fulfill that original vision because the old guard was wounded and needed to protect themselves and we needed to survive.
But 25 years later, the underlying belief remains - collect the data, study the data, give people personalized attention and access based on that data, and they will reward you with their loyalty. And their money.
No one in music has done it.
Yet.
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