FEATURE: Supercharging standom
Written for Digital Frontier [22/5/25]
How data is shaping the modern music landscape and helping artists market to key fans
There has been a shift in the last couple of years to secure equitable “artist-centric” streaming models within the music industry. How successful it’s proving to be so far depends on who you speak to. Few would argue, however, with the spirit of the effort. Rooting out fraudulent artist accounts, as prioritised by Spotify, the leading digital service provider (DSP) in music, and reallocating shares in royalty pools are all positive steps towards a fairer ecosystem.
Lucian Grainge, CEO of the world’s largest major record label Universal Music Group, wrote in a 2024 company memo that the corporation’s next pivot will be to superfans. “Our pioneering artist-centric strategy will extend its reach. We first focused on a fairer way to allocate the streaming pie among real artists by addressing fraud and other aspects that deprive artists of their just compensation,” he wrote. “The next focus of our strategy will be to grow the pie for all artists, by strengthening the artist-fan relationship through superfan experiences and products.”
A report released by Goldman Sachs the previous year estimated a $4.2bn market opportunity in superfans. Elsewhere, Luminate’s 2023 Midyear Music Report found that 15% of the US population qualified as superfans (or “stans”) by interacting with artists in at least five ways, including attending live shows and buying merchandise.
Robert Kyncl, CEO of Warner Music Group, another of the “big three” major labels, also revealed in a company memo last year that a superfan app is in the works. “We need to develop our direct artist-superfan products and experiences,” he wrote. “Both artists and superfans want deeper relationships, and it’s an area that’s relatively untapped and under-monetised.”
The picture from the top is clear. Superfans are an underutilised and lucrative audience segment.
(Data) knowledge is power
If large music companies want to better hone in on the fans that matter the most, they need data to power it. Unsigned artists marketing their music in DIY fashion can also extract value from fan data.
Music analytics platforms fit for the streaming era have long provided this information, becoming an essential resource for artists and repertoire (A&R) managers, marketing teams and more. Dominant names such as Chartmetric collect data from multiple sources and categorise them into streaming figures, audience locations, demographics, playlisting and more.
The idea is that artists and music industry employees alike can make more informed decisions. Deciding which countries to tour in based on the concentration data of their most engaged fans is a common benefit.
““The industry as a whole has to come together and identify a way where all of this can be centralised because there are way too many avenues””
Knowledge, of course, is power. But some startups understand that greater strength lays in how artists or their teams use that knowledge with an eye on superfans.
Influencer marketing and fandom targeting
Round is one music tech startup that is recognising the need for artists to better identify, target and recruit new fans to boost their careers. Founded in 2019, Round began life as a customer relationship management (CRM) service within music, focused on smart ad targeting through social media. When the covid-19 pandemic hit and the content creator market bloomed, Round changed gear to develop infrastructure to match the right kind of influencer with the right music, helping to drive virality of music content.
For example, Round could suggest to a management team that a micro influencer (a more “authentic” influencer with fewer than 10,000 followers) whom they’ve identified via their tech loves Coldplay and lives in a city where they’re due to perform, could kickstart a viral TikTok dance soundtracked by the band’s new single.
Genre “tastemaker” influencers who engage a more niche community can also be surfaced using Round’s proprietary tech, creating a chance to work with individuals who can maximise reach to that community. Round can help build “organic” strategies in influencer marketing but can also hijack existing viral moments by harnessing its tech to spot promising user-generated content (UGC) early. The startup’s services in fandom, however, is where there is more room to grow.
Round director Vishal Ramakrishnan tells Digital Frontier that fandom is a key focus for the startup. He credits this to transforming Round’s business model from an ad tech service agency to its iteration today. “Super fandom is something that’s really evolving,” he says, and is “really important” for artists to laser in on.
Fan evolution in the digital age
Until recent years, ticket sales were the low hanging fruit indicator of a superfan profile, Ramakrishnan continues. Now, it’s crucial to understand how digital and social media has impacted this. Different categories of fans – from stans at the top level to passive fans who come across snippets of an artist’s music on social media – have emerged.
“Bandwagon” fans, Ramakrishnan adds, are those who jump on a trend circulating on social media. He notes the viral Charli xcx “Apple” dance trend as an example of these fair-weather types: people who perhaps didn’t know Charli’s music and have since become engaged with it. That category is ripe for converting them into passive fans and, furthermore, ones who follow her social media accounts or stream her music.
In addition, younger generations such as Gen Z or Gen Alpha spend a significant amount of their time in gaming metaverses including “Roblox” and “Fortnite”. “Being able to understand this whole intergenerational change, why it’s really important to have your song in a game, why it’s important to have your song on social media, why it’s important to be able to look at it from a holistic perspective, is crucial as an artist,” Ramakrishnan says. That “holistic perspective” is what Round is hoping to arrive at for artists in the future.
Credit: Kevin Cane
A pervading issue is that this industry data is very fragmented. Ramakrishnan explains that if an artist performs a concert, only the ticketing company will have data about the attendees. If an artist sells merch, whoever they’re partnering with will have that merch data. “Whoever is looking at the streaming part of the business, they would have the streaming data,” he says. It’s disjointed and “a really hard problem” to fix, says Ramakrishnan, with no silver bullet solution.
“The industry as a whole has to come together and identify a way where all of this can be centralised because there are way too many avenues. [A]n artist can only do so much beyond music creation,” Ramakrishnan says.
He sees value in building what he calls a fan relationship management (FRM) tool, which functions similarly to a traditional CRM tool. Round is researching and experimenting in this area. It’s a centralised place where artists have their newsletter data, merch details and more. The tech could identify a fan who has attended a concert in London, bought some merch, subscribed to the artist’s newsletter and has streamed their music heavily.
This “basically means they’re part of a super fan community”, says Ramakrishnan, and would indicate to the artist that they need to ramp up communication with said fan “way more than another set of people who are just on social media”.
Stats don’t lie
At present, Round’s focus isn’t on creating centralised databases for clients but is on how the data inside sub-categories – from geolocations to streaming figures – is leveraged to target fans effectively.
How has the startup tested such waters in a superfan context? Round was recently enlisted by Shakira’s management team to collate key information about her fans to bolster connection. This was done through a campaign on social media. Shakira asked her fans to send in clips related to her song about singledom, “Soltera”, which features on her 2025 Grammy award winning album “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran”.
Fans could choose their preferred platform – be it TikTok, Instagram or otherwise – and submit their videos for the chance to win the singer’s Lamborghini. The idea was that CRM data could be collected during the process.
““It’s really important to build up your super fan community and to have the data because the next point is, how do you migrate a fan from social into your Discord?””
In this scenario, Round developed a bespoke website with digital infrastructure that managed traffic and ensured full legal compliance in data collection. The fans’ UGC posted on social media had to also be submitted to the portal to enter the competition. Clips were narrowed down by a fan vote before Shakira chose the winner. Overall, 194,000 contestants took part in submitting 430,000 videos, which generating 45.5 million views and added 300,000 of Shakira’s most engaged fans to her CRM.
The portal that Round built for the UGC submissions became a landing page for valuable data. “It essentially told us who the superfans are,” says Ramakrishnan. Round could see which fans posted quickly when Shakira announced the challenge and which ones submitted multiple entries. This experiment identified superfans but also aggregated and analysed fragmented data to provide Shakira and her team with a 360-degree view of their most influential audiences.
Ramakrishnan is, however, aware that there’s room for improvement drilling down on the data. “The next step potentially could have been, ‘OK, how can we make this better and segregate these fans into different categories based on how many times they’ve seen the profile, how many other [areas] they’ve participated in, how many communities they’re in?’” he says.
That’s where Round would aim to roll out AI functionality, enabling its system to isolate the fans deemed “super” via a study of their engagement (for example, purchasing merch and tickets), down to less active fans who follow a few of Shakira’s social media profiles. Round can also identify casual listeners, providing artists, management teams and record labels with information about fans who have the potential to be converted into much more engaged ones. In effect, the CRM platform which Round built for Shakira’s “Soltera” UGC challenge became a launchpad for fan conversion.
Fixing artist-fan relationships
It can also be a safeguard for where other channels fail, Ramakrishnan says, such as when social media engagement drops dramatically.
“I was having a conversation with another artist [who has a] decent number of social media followers,” he says. “Over the couple of months there’s been a significant drop in their TikTok and Instagram engagement, which meant they had a big hit on their streaming.”
The artist saw a 25% to 30% drop, he said, despite following community guidelines and the same templates as before. Their views had dropped from around 100,000 all the way to around 3,000 views.
“And so suddenly, you find value in super fans,” Ramakrishnan continues. A CRM or “FRM” tool which shows an artist who is listening to their music, who is subscribed to their newsletter, who is pre-saving their upcoming releases campaigns becomes gold dust. An artist’s dependency on social media will also “slightly reduce”, he says, which can sometimes fall victim to platform algorithms.
Rather than relying so heavily on the centralised web and the Big Tech social media platforms, artists can look to build a community of fans on Discord or launch their own newsletter.
“There are ways that I can still connect with fans and make them feel like they are speaking with me directly rather than just commenting on my Instagram,” he imagines. “It’s really important to build up your super fan community and to have the data because the next point is, how do you migrate a fan from social into your Discord? How do you migrate a fan from a casual listener to coming to your event?”
There is a huge opportunity there with fandom, which Ramakrishnan knows the industry, including his own company, is trying to solve. “But it’s going to take a minute for us to be able to identify how you can get this data because it’s so fragmented,” he says. The Shakira campaign experiment suggests that Round is a startup primed to build out on its tools and strategies to help artists connect better with fans.
AI and ad tech
Other startups that are operating in the fandom space include Beatchain. The startup’s primary focus is discoverability, helping to surface promising independent artists to A&R managers, labels and collaborators. But it also provides artists with a platform that houses data and tools to better target and grow their fanbase without the hefty price tag for a marketing team.
‘Fan Builder’ is a promotional tool that makes marketing simple and effective, says Ben Mendoza, CEO of Beatchain. “If you want to tell people about your music, you want to get out there and be exposed, then you have to put some paid ads out,” he says. “And most of the artists we meet understand that but would hardly call themselves experts in Facebook Business Manager or the other ad tools.”
“Our job has been to abstract away that complexity, give them a really simple-to-use interface [where] we can tell them from their data, ‘This is the content that’s working best for you, this is what you should post’,” he continues to Digital Frontier. Artists can then choose how much they want to spend and the length of the campaign.
Beatchain’s software – incorporating all the streaming data and other information like a fan’s location or social post engagements – is then used to create the profiles based on lookalike audiences tied to artists they associate with. “It does all that for them behind the curtain,” adds Mendoza. “What’s important to [artists] is it’s only good if it produces the outcomes they want: to build their followers and get exposure.”
““I wouldn’t say we are the only company to be [collecting and collating data], but our innovation comes from how you use that data rather than just saying we have it””
Michael Anderson, COO of Beatchain, explains that the startup uses a machine learning model to identify target audiences on social platforms. “It means [the artist] can put very small budgets behind ads and get really good engagement from those ads to get likes on their posts and click-throughs to Spotify for their new tracks. That’s the main way we use AI at the moment,” he says.
It’s still early days experimenting with AI in Round’s proprietary tech, too, Ramakrishnan explains. “We’re figuring out how best to make this useful. Currently, where the tech is really helpful is in identifying creators and communities, identifying what’s working on platform and what’s not. We’re able to identify people or communities who are on the verge of growing exponentially – but before,” he says.
The startup director cites TikTok content creator “Tube Girl” as an example of where Round had commissioned campaigns with her before she “sort of blew up last year” (Sabrina Bahsoon, aka “Tube Girl”, has views in the millions). “We’re able to create value for the client in terms of being able to identify something or someone – a community or a person who’s on the up, who’s on the rise – and be able to work with them much before. So you go on that rise with your artist as well.”
“And the second thing is, because we’re able to identify creators, we’re also able to identify all of these dance music communities, niches and music tastemakers,” Ramakrishnan says. “We can search for it, identify it and give the client as targeted of an approach as possible rather than a very overarching approach.
“The next stage could potentially be using all of this data to be able to suggest, ‘OK, you as a creator or you as an artist, if you’re doing this type of music, historically these are the types of content that have worked well, this is how similar artists are doing.’”
The Shakira campaign has proved a fertile test bed for Ramakrishnan’s team at Round, which understands that the modes of interpretating data are more important for frontier growth than consolidating disparate data across streaming, merch and ticket sales.
“Historically, I wouldn’t say we are the only company to be [collecting and collating data],” says Ramakrishnan. “But our innovation comes from how you use that data rather than just saying we have it.”
Too many tools are already given to artists and management teams that “aren’t broken down enough” for them to extract value from, he adds. Improving on that is the “innovation curve” that Round is now redoubling its efforts on.
