In this piece Amber Horsburgh breaks down some interesting streaming statistics suggesting that, contrary to many conventional marketing theories, marketing to listeners who have never heard your music can be a more profitable approach than trying to cultivate a rapid central fanbase.
Guest post by Amber Horsburgh.
Amber writes about music strategy via her fortnightly newsletter, Deep Cuts,Subscribe here. This article originally appeared on Medium
How do you build an artist’s brand? Can you do it from the bottom up amassing fan after fan until there’s a rabid enough base to breakthrough? It’s a commonly held belief that breaking songs is the result of huge vocal, dedicated fan-bases but fans aren’t actually that loyal.
To test this, I analyzed 107 artists on Spotify comparing followers to monthly listeners, using followers as a proxy for fans/heavy users. Only 24% of an artist’s total listenership is made up of fans. That’s it.
What’s perhaps even more grim is that for smaller acts (<1M followers, e.g.: Jeff Tweedy), the average is lower at 11%, whereas big acts (>1M followers, e.g.: Dua Lipa) it’s higher at 26%. This challenges the notion that building artists happens from engaging the hyper-dedicated core fan base of early adopters and instead results from increasing market share by adding more light listeners, which may not stick around for the next release.
To view the raw data, see here.
Although, not a perfect measure for loyalty followers to monthly listeners is a fine proxy. This finding is supported by marketing science of Byron Sharp, who tracked purchasing patterns of grocery products finding the bottom 80% of customers (light users) were most profitable in the next year and the top 20% aka “brand loyalists” bought less over time, becoming less valuable. Big brands have known this for years and from Facebook to Quaker Oats have altered their marketing to amass huge audiences by focusing on light users, and musicians should too.
Imagine going to work, popping on headphones and listening to one artist for the entire work day then doing it again the next day and the next. Inevitably, you’ll max out the artist. Sharp calls this the “regression to the mean” and what this tells us, is increasing listenership from existing fans will cap out eventually, thus needing to add new listeners.
Even the best buyers aren’t that loyal: There’s an inevitable “regression to the mean” where heavy buyers often buy less over time; light buyers buy more; and some non-buyers become buyers. So brands can’t afford to count anyone out — By ron Sharp, How Brands Grow There’s two problems if only marketing to fans:
Guest post by Amber Horsburgh.
Amber writes about music strategy via her fortnightly newsletter, Deep Cuts,
Music listeners are rarely loyal to one act
Spending marketing $$$ to only reach fans misses big opportunities
- You’ll reach your ceiling 4 times earlier than if you’d reach light listeners
- You’re selling to people who are already bought in