Followers, Fans, and Stans: An Artist Framework for Tracking and Converting Audience Engagement

Nov 04, 2019

Happy Monday! Thanks for opening the eighth edition of the Stan newsletter. A newsletter exploring fans and their bidirectional relationships with the artists that they love. As always suggestions and feedback are always appreciated. You can shoot me an email at dkuhlor@gmail.com.

Photo by Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash

What is a fan?

What defines a fan? For this weeks Stan article I sought to explore and create a framework that artists can use to measure audience engagement. As there are more and more ways for individuals to engage with artists, it has become increasingly important for artists to segment and understand the composition of their fan bases in order to effectively optimize their artist offerings. First, I want to acknowledge that a lot of this is more of an art than a science and this framework will evolve in parallel with artist fan/relationships. The insights generated by employing this framework at best will provide the artist with a more informed understanding of their audience but can never serve as a source of absolute truth. In the coming weeks I will refer to this framework for future articles around creating artist offerings based on audience engagement and artist life cycle, calculating a Fans Lifetime Value, and the evolution of audience analytics.

What an Artist Needs to Understand:

In order for an artist to provide the best fan experience possible they must determine the likeliness of their fans to engage and how deep they are willing to engage. To do this an artist needs to define a fan likeliness percentage.

Yearly Fan Likeliness Percentage (YFLP) = How likely the fan is to engage with future addressable artist offerings.

Yearly Fan Engagement (YFE) = active fan participation (online and offline) + $$ spent on products or experiences associated with an artists likeness (concert tickets, merch, books, etc.)

Yearly Addressable Artist Offerings (YAAO)= # of opportunities an artist provides for fans to engage that are addressable to the fan.This includes online and offline plus free and paid.

**addressable becomes very important when defining audience engagement in emerging markets. In order to effectively segment an artists audience engagement in a certain market you have to take into account which of the artists offerings is addressable. For example, if you are looking at audience engagement in Ghana and the artist has never performed there it can not count as addressable.

Using these definitions calculating YFLP becomes super simple (in theory).

YFE/YAAO= Yearly Fan Likeliness Percentage

Using YFLP to Define Fan Archetypes and Segment Your Audience

Once an artist can determine YFLP they can segment their audience based on percentage ranges. For purposes of this article I created my own percentage ranges but each artist should create their own percentage rangers as many other factors can go into creating the ranges.

Follower: 0-30%
1. A person who is able to identify the artist and their music when they passively come across it. Followers do not actively seek out the artist* or their music but are familiar with it when heard.

* The follower must be seeking the artist on social media because they resonate with them as an artist. If a follower is already following an influencer or comedian who then expands into music even though the act of following them was active participation it is still passive as it was not the influencers music that led to them choosing to follow.

How do people become followers?
1. Hearing a song on a playlist, the radio, pandora, at a party, etc.
2. Being introduced to the artist through a feature.
3. Watching the artist open up at the show of another artist that the follower came to see.
4. Being introduced to an artist through content - TikTok, Instagram, a Twitter meme,etc.
Follower Likeliness to Engage with Artist Offerings
1. Low for things that require active participation, which is why they are a follower in the first place.
Casual Fan: 30%-60%
1. A casual fan is able to identify the artist and their music and infrequently seeks it out demonstrating a growing activeness in fan participation. A casual fan does not frequently seek out the artist or their music but are able to identify the artist and their music and welcomes low output opportunities to engage.
2. How do people become casual fans?
  1. Converting a follower to a casual fan is all about constant reinforcement of the actions performed to get an individual to be a follower. The more artist offerings an individual is able to continue to engage with as a follower the better likelihood of them becoming a casual fan.
Dedicated Fan: 60% -80%
1. A dedicated fan constantly seeks out content, merchandise, and music that is adjacent to the artist. This includes things that an artist does not necessarily own or get to benefit from the upside of (even if they are driving sales to a product). A dedicated fan subscribes to many aspects of an artists lifestyle that extend way beyond their music. Where they eat, how they dress, where they vacation, etc.
2. How do people become dedicated fans?
  1. Converting a casual fan to a dedicated fan is a combination of the opportunities that they get to engage as a follower and casual fan but providing them with more opportunities or visibility into an artist's life beyond music. This is where documentaries, behind the scenes look, and interviews become increasingly important as a casual fan seeks to understand and determine whether they align enough with an artists overall ethos to be a dedicated fan.
Stan: 80%+
1. A stan goes above and beyond to connect, defend, and promote an artist and often times seeks to participate in a community of other dedicated fans or stans that is centered solely around that artist. A stan not only consumes all the content and artist offerings that a follower, casual fan, and dedicated fan do but they play a large part in driving or creating that content based on their intimate knowledge of the artist. Additionally, because of their dedication many Stans enjoy a line of communication with that artist or someone on the artists team where they can provide feedback and suggestions.
2. How do people become stans? How do you keep stans engaged?
  1. Converting a dedicated fan to a stan relies largely on the strength of the community that a stan becomes a part of. It is for this reason that an artist should focus on recognizing and empowering that community while also recognizing that their goal is to thrive even when the artist is not actively participating. Meg thee Stallion did this brilliantly when she became the defacto coach of her fanbase (affectionately named Hotties) as they sought to have a Hot Girl Summer. She leveraged her position as the artist to constantly define the term, provide examples of what behavior was in line and not in line with the definition, and an anthem in the way of a collaboration with Nicki Minaj titled Hot Girl Summer.

The Underlying Truth and Problem with this Framework

To leverage this framework properly it is important to understand the truth it seeks to help artists determine. This framework prioritizes understanding an artists audience engagement in aggregate and through segmentation based on engagement. It is for that reason that I chose to give every type of engagement the same weight. An artist can explore adding to this framework by adding more or less weight to certain artist offerings (i.e - listening to a stream is weighted less than buying a piece of merchandise) however I think that what will happen if an artist does this is that naturally more weight will be given to things involving money, leading to an inaccurate portrayal of their fan engagement. To weight experiences involving money an artist would ultimately need a deeper understanding of a fans financial picture to determine how significant the amount expended is in relation to other things. Does a $1200 VIP ticket get weighted more than a $40 merch purchase? Taking it one step further how is it weighted when the VIP ticket is purchased by a millionaire versus the $40 merch purchase a fan saved money for weeks to have the money to purchase? I don’t think there is yet enough context (and most likely never will be) around individual fans to assign additional weight on engagements involving money.

The biggest problem with this framework is the barriers presented by data silos that make it difficult to collect the information needed. I will dive deeper into the specific problems lack of access to data and data silos present as audiences seek to build and have active engaged fan bases.