Fan Growth Tech: More Fans, Buying More Things

What does it actually take to turn followers into fans who buy? 

This week, we're digging into Fan Growth, one of the 8 revenue multipliers in our Rising Tide miniseries. First, DJay Brawner of TUFF MGMT and MANAGR breaks down why the real work often starts before you grow your audience, making sure you're collecting the money from the fans you already have. Then, Megh Vakharia of SymphonyOS shares how AI agents are turning discovery moments into direct revenue, from automated ad campaigns to catalog valuations. Finally, Anj Fayemi of Rivet explains how unified fan data powers automations that drive repeat merch sales and sell out venues twice as fast.

This episode is part of the Rising Tide miniseries, working through the revenue multipliers that grow the value of the music industry, all leading up to the Music Tectonics Conference this October in Santa Monica.

Listen wherever you pod your casts:

Looking for Rock Paper Scanner, the newsletter of music tech news curated by the Rock Paper Scissors PR team? Subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Friday!

Episode Transcript

Machine transcribed

DJay Brawner

[00:00:00] Dmitri: DJay Brawner cut his teeth booking shows and talent buying at The Alley in Fullerton, giving Southern California some of its earliest stages for The Gaslight Anthem and OneRepublic, while also directing his first music video for punk and hardcore act Emory in 2004, and helping route national tours for bands like The Matches and Voodoo Glow Skulls.

He later served as COO of a music TV network before spending two decades producing over 500 music videos through his own production company, and eventually launching Tuff Management, spanning music videos, artist management, and touring. Today, it all comes back to one goal: helping artists build real, lasting careers without burning out the way he almost did.

And yes, he's also a founder with Managr. That's M-A-N-A-G-R.cc, which helps managers manage their rosters. Super cool to have you here. How's it going, DJay?

[00:00:54] DJay: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I feel great. You said so many things that I usually say in a much longer, span of time in a much shorter v- span of time, so.

[00:01:02] Dmitri: Yeah. I grew up in New York, so I talk fast, too, but hopefully our audience is along for the ride here. We're here in this Rising Tide miniseries. We're talking about growing the market and the value of music. It's great to have, somebody that's been involved with managing bands, marketing bands, breaking bands, but also as a tech founder, yourself.

That's cool. We've got that balance there. I wanna ask you something. What's the toughest thing artists face today for growing their audience?

[00:01:28] DJay: I think it's... The toughest thing right now really is building an audience or turning that audience into actual fans. Like, with the rising tide of social media and, like, growth on social media, we can see artists getting a lot of views, a lot of plays, and a lot of followers, but that doesn't necessarily convert over into actual fans.

And a fan is a person who buys tickets to concerts, you know, buys your merchandise, and streams your songs. It's like there's this whole world out there where musicians are turning into influencers or content creators and a lot of, like, the actual conversion that we wanna see, uh, for our artists is not necessarily coming through.

[00:02:05] Dmitri: Yeah. Makes sense. Well, let's say an artist is working on this. Yes, it's converting them, but they're also just sort of trying to, like, gather fans around them, grow that audience, whether it's, you know, followers, listeners on Spotify or on social media. Obviously, social media has become this interesting bridge.

Like, on the one hand, you could talk about the fragmentation between artists and fans because they listen one place, but then they promote another place. And anyway, I'm curious from you, what do you think are the biggest challenges that these artists face for marketing and getting their fan base to spend money on them?

[00:02:36] DJay: You know, I think as artists nowadays, or if we look backwards, let's say, back to the, you know, early 2000s, the '90s, when we found an artist, there was a discovery period.

It felt like something that was unique to us, and you wanted to go along for the journey with those bands or those, those artists. And over time, that journey has started to disappear a little bit, but then also become a completely different way of engaging with a potential fan base. You're creating a story in a new way that's almost this daily, you know, having to post daily, having to tell people to listen to your songs, having to, you know, post about your merch to then have them convert into a ticket buyer or what, or merch, purchaser.

 I think that getting those people to connect with you in a way that feels authentic to your brand has become really hard because you're more or less, having to serve this giant ecosystem of all kinds of people that are out there all competing for the same attention from the same group of artists.

And, like, developing that fan base is such an important thing to turn into a ticket buyer, and that's why, like, leveraging platforms like Laylo and, like, these other things can create a bigger and deeper-rooted connection. I've kind of didn't answer your question, now as I'm going through this, but I think it's like, generally speaking, like, getting people to actually click through is probably the biggest challenge.

So it's developing that story that gives them a reason to click through and convert is where I think right now artists have struggled the most.

[00:04:04] Dmitri: Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah.

So I'm curious, I'm glad you mentioned Laylo 'cause I do wanna get into the c- I mean, that's sort of the whole point here is what are the tech platforms that can really contribute to this growth of audience, growth of fans, segmentation, all that kind of stuff.

But let me ask you some other questions first. If you were helping a band that's at that middle point where they have traction but they're not really making enough money to live comfortably without killing themselves in a tour bus, what would you be telling them to do?

[00:04:29] DJay: Hmm. it's tricky 'cause I think the baseline of that statement is, like, activity doesn't necessarily mean that you're growing, and activity doesn't necessarily mean that you're, um, making money. You're not necessarily financially secure. So it's looking at different opportunities across music. And when I say music, I'm thinking about everything related to music.

So, you know, you could be playing shows but not collecting royalties. You could be playing shows but not selling your music. You could be playing shows and not selling your merch. Like, there's so many different places in this music industry for you to be actually collecting, and some people don't even know that you have all these different places where you can collect your royalties.

They think, "Oh, I c- upload my, my music to ASCAP, and that's it." No, there's SoundExchange. There's the MLC. I mean, there's different territories. There's, you know, rights across the world, and you may not be collecting all, of your royalties in places. Sometimes it's a matter of cleaning up and looking through, you know, the cracks to figure out where maybe money's being left on the table.

 I also think that, you know, there's a way to reevaluate your fan base and reinvigorate that fan base. Sometimes, you know, You can't be flatlining. I have an artist that, flatlined, and what we decided to do was we decided to look backwards and take time away so that we could come back, and it was really to rethink about how we can reengage that fan base and turn those into merch sellers.

Like, you can, oversaturate your own fan base, so sometimes it does take time to step back so that you can now have something new to sell them, whether it's a entirely new look, it's entirely new merch platform or entirely new merch designs, an entirely new, you know, vinyl album, whatever it might be.

It's like, sometimes it takes a minute to step back and look at your fans. And I'll, I'll say this in a more succinct way, like, what I'm truly saying is like, you know, you could be playing 50,000-cap rooms every single night, which would be an amazing place to be as an artist, but you may not necessarily be selling, you know, the amount of merch that you wanna be selling.

 maybe what you need to do is go back and go, "Oh, well, maybe I should play 5,000-cap rooms and reinvigorate my audience to, you know, get connected to me in a new way, in a way that they haven't felt with me in a long time." I mean, I think Those are bigger numbers that we probably should be talking about right now is probably you're playing 5,000-cap rooms and maybe you need to reinvigorate and go back down to 500-cap rooms.

But, you know, there's just a lot of different places that I think, you know, you could be looking to try to, monetize your music in a new way.

[00:06:55] Dmitri: I'm really intrigued by this conversation because I thought we'd be talking about something different, but I love the manager hat where it's like, go back to basics, you know?

Like, I'm thinking like, how do you grow your audience? What tech do you use to grow your audience? How do you segment your audience? What... You know, what kind of offers do you give your audience? What are the methods for this? And I think we'll probably get to that, but I just wanna say, like, I think it's actually kinda cool.

This happens to me sometimes. I'll, construct a podcast outline and think about questions and think we'll be going one direction, and then my guest is, like, kinda schooling me, like, "Bro, you're not even collecting the money." Like, that's the first thing is, like, let's make sure the money machine is in place before you even grow your audience.

Maybe you need to shrink your audience, which is the opposite of what I wanted to be talking about, but is, uh, probably good advice.

[00:07:40] DJay: It, I mean, it's funny 'cause you could have an audience where you have, you know, 200,000 followers on Instagram, but you've come to realize that your actual core audience of that 200,000 followers is 2,000.

Those 2,000 people is, you know, the 1% of your audience is actually engaged, actually, you know, purchasing tickets to your shows. And, like, so sometimes it's a matter of like, okay, how do we service those 2,000 people that are really truly, our actual, like, customer when the rest of the followers are just along for the ride, they're passive.

So take those 2,000 and let those 2,000 people actually be the ones that grow your audience and help be almost your spokesperson to, like, make your audience get bigger from there. 'Cause the more people you have talking about you and more people engaging you, actually in a lot of ways organically build that foundation.

[00:08:27] Dmitri: Hmm. Yeah, that's really interesting. So almost like your audience got diluted somehow, but you need, like, more of an authentic core that's a certain percentage of what you consider your fan base to be doing some of the work for you just because they're so engaged with you.

[00:08:40] DJay: Yeah.

[00:08:41] Dmitri: Yeah. Listen, I was gonna ask you a little bit about how much money's at stake, but I don't think we're there yet.

I'm gonna skip ahead, and maybe we'll come back to some of these questions that I like to ask on this Rising Tide theme about the value of market. So I'm gonna skip ahead a couple of questions. I mean, it's tough to be an artist today. You have to be creative, you write songs, work with band members or collaborators.

Going on tour is a huge time suck and, and labor intensive. it's physically intensive. You have to post on socials. You talked about that. You have to engage with fans, partner with managers and labels and publishers. There's all these team members once you- as you start to get a team. It's hard to parse all the data, to collect all the checks, you talked about that, to keep your fan base happy.

 it's really fragmented, and my theory for this episode is that marketing technology or fan growth tools can be a revenue multiplier if they're used well. I'm curious, what technology platforms have you tested and used that you like that help artists and managers and labels that are focused on things like audience growth, targeting, and getting paid?

[00:09:41] DJay: I mean, the, the one that I use and I use for almost every one of the artists on my roster is Laylo. Um-

[00:09:46] Dmitri: Hmm

[00:09:46] DJay: ... I've

 found that y- you know, over the years I've tried different you know, things from Mailchimp to, you know, all the other sort of Mailchimp-esque platforms that, you know, target ads and, and you can s- sell your music, whatever.

But I found that Laylo has been the most effective because it has a, three-tiered approach. I mean, you could do Instagram DMs, you can do SMS, and you can do email. And the way that it just is set up is it's simple. it creates a, a path for your audience to engage with you in a very authentic way, and it gives a path for you to engage with your audience in a very authentic way.

 the conversion rate on those Laylo messages, if you're not familiar with Laylo, Laylo gives you an opportunity to DM people, email people, and SMS people to either listen to your music, you know, buy a T-shirt, you can give them exclusives. It also gives you the analytics of where all of those people are, are living, where they're based, how many followers they have.

And that's all information that you can leverage later in different ways. A lot of platforms gatekeep some of that information, so you... it's harder to, you know, leverage it. So, like, you know, One thing Laylo does is it it opens up your entire, they give you all of the contacts.

So, I can take anything that I learned on La- Laylo and move all of those contacts over to Mailchimp and then target those people in a different place. it's been the most effective. I use it for pretty much every release, every merch drop for most of my roster. Um, of course, like, I use things like Feature.fm, you know, Linkfire, you know, we use all of those sort of different platforms that allow for, like, smart links and, you know, different types of demos or Komie, where it kind of curates all of your stuff into one link to, you know, sell merch right there, get people to sign up to smart links for your releases, whatever it might be.

[00:11:26] Dmitri: Is Laylo organized around campaigns? Is that why you like it so much because it's around a s- a specific release, or is it literally a Mailchimp replacement?

[00:11:35] DJay: I wouldn't call it a Mailchimp replacement because Mailchimp definitely serves a purpose for bigger and broader information. But I would say that Laylo is kind of your, your CRM, your fan capture, and your messaging platform all built into one.

So, let's say we have, you know, a T-shirt that's coming out and we wanna, you know, give... I think here's a great example. Like, we've collected, 100 signups on Laylo, and we wanna thank those people. Well, by thanking those people, we can give them a drop for an early, merch item just for them and tell them, like, "If you buy this right now, it'll, you know, you'll get 50% off or whatever."

And then that conversion rate turns into an actual sale. you can also center it around, you know, the release of, uh... I mean, they call it drops, so it's really anything you wanna drop to your audience, merch, tours, songs. And it doesn't necessarily have to be tied to a campaign, but you can leverage it into your campaign.

[00:12:27] Dmitri: Gotcha. You also mentioned, Feature.fm. How does that work and, and how do you use it?

[00:12:33] DJay: Man, there's so many functions in Feature.fm that I don't even leverage to its full ability. sometimes the record labels will do a little bit more of that work than I will 'cause there's a lot of, a lot of features in there.

But, you know, the baseline option for us with Feature is really, like, your playlist, your song saving, your pre-release campaigns, um, leveraging Feature to take what was a pre-save link and turn it into your active link for that specific song so that you can hit all the different DSPs.

So, you know, I could have a song coming out, you know, in a week. I can use Feature.fm to, capture all my pre-saves through that platform, and then later that same link will become, you know, the link that you can still use as your marketing tool for getting people to stream that specific song

[00:13:17] Dmitri: Got it. And you mentioned another one.

I'm sorry to ask, but I've never heard of Komi. What, what is... How do you spell Komi, and what is it? Yeah.

[00:13:23] DJay: Uh, K-O-M-I.I-O. Got it. It's similar to Feature, but it, I guess the best way to describe it is it kind of can create a mini splash website for you that can call all of your information into one place.

So if, you know, you ha- instead of using, like, Linkfire or Linktree, you can use Komi, and Komi, you can actually add your merch directly into there and sell your merch. It can also put all of your bands in town, tour dates directly in there. It can have all of your song links. It can create smart links for you.

 I don't know if you could put your Laylo in there, but you could definitely do, like, a link out to Laylo. it just kind of creates, like, a mini website that's very visible and viewable on the phone, to just make everything at the, you know, the fingertips of your audience.

[00:14:07] Dmitri: So are you using the, the Linkfires or Linktrees, the Feature, the Komi, the Laylo all on one artist or one release?

Or it's, is it, are some of them getting introduced 'cause of label partnerships that already have something going, or how does it work?

[00:14:21] DJay: Y- you know, it's a little bit different depending on each artist. I think each artist kind of leverages these platforms differently, and it all depends on what they've paid for.

So, you know, sometimes, you know, you have an artist that already has a S- a Featured.fm subscription, so you're using that. Sometimes you have an artist that already has a Komi or, and so we're leveraging that. Or maybe the record label is giving us links to be leveraging for, you know, a specific release, so we're using the links that they have.

I think, like, a Komi is a little bit more of, like, a artist and manager platform than something that a record label would give you. But, like, your distributors or your record labels are probably gonna leverage something more like a Featured.fm. the Linkfire, Linktrees are kind of m- also more of, like, an artist-driven link site.

 but it, it really just depends.

[00:15:04] Dmitri: Yeah, yeah. Um, have we left any other kind of platforms in this marketing tech that you, wanna mention, whether it's a CRM, a drop tool, a analytics, any social music marketing tools?

[00:15:17] DJay: I mean, I, I, I leverage a lot of Chartmetric data just for understanding where my audience is living and breathing.

 I think that Chartmetrics is a really great tool for understanding, like, you know- Just your general artist analytics. I mean, I don't know how... other way to explain it, but-

[00:15:32] Dmitri: Yeah.

Yeah

[00:15:32] DJay: ... that definitely in, that definitely, kind of guides us certain directions, you know? Like, if we're looking at Chartmetric and we're seeing that, like, that we have audiences in markets that we didn't know that we had audiences in, we're gonna maybe drive a little bit more traffic to that place, which then inherently will bring more money to our artists.

Like, we had an artist recently that was doing really well in Santa Barbara, and we found that information out because of Chartmetric. And so we had that artist go up to Santa Barbara and just do sort of a campaign around the fact that they were streaming really, really well there, and they had been building kind of an organic audience there.

And that then inherently will hopefully turn into an actual paid audience at some point. But for them, it was really a marketing tool that we leveraged that data for.

[00:16:13] Dmitri: so, uh, DJay, let me ask you, does that mean that you're paying for ads that are geotargeting that area, or does that mean they're going to try to...

Talking to an agent to try to book a show there, or are they doing a listening party? What, what do you do once you say, "Hey, that's weird. We have this weird pop in Santa Barbara"?

[00:16:28] DJay: So the way that I operate, and this is me specifically, and I can say that everyone operates differently. So everything you just said are all things I think you could leverage and do in a situation like this.

 depending on the artist and the size of the artist, I'm all about the organic approach, the grassroots approach. That might be coming from my promoter days when, back when I would actually hand out p- flyers at shows and, you know, be standing outside venues with, you know, a stack of 500 flyers to market the show that we have coming up.

 with this specific instance, this specific band, they drove up to Santa Barbara. they hand- pass out flyers, and they played acoustic in different areas so that we could get content for it and then leverage that into hopefully bringing even more awareness to the band in that place.

But to that same note, like, you know, yes, we, you know, tried getting some shows up there. Yes, you know, our record label did put more of an ad spend into that market to generate, you know, a little bit more awareness for the band, and that's something you could do kind of anywhere. And I wou- I don't think we would have necessarily done that had we not seen the data that we saw on Chartmetric.

[00:17:30] Dmitri: Are you saying they played in the street or in coffee shops?

[00:17:33] DJay: On the street.

[00:17:34] Dmitri: Yeah. Oh, wow. And did, fans that knew them come up to them and, or find out about it? Or was it more like, "The vibe is just right here, so let's see what happens"?

[00:17:42] DJay: For this one, it was like the vibe was just right, you know?

Like, I-

[00:17:45] Dmitri: Yeah

[00:17:45] DJay: ... I happened to know Santa... I mean, I had friends that went to college there, so I knew where to, for the, where these guys to go, and I told them exactly what street corners to, to go to on what specific day of the week, and, and that's what we did.

[00:17:56] Dmitri: Yeah. Nice. okay. Well, that's been helpful to s- just kind of talk through what are the types of tools that we're talking about for helping with marketing.

But I'm curious, what types of tech or, platforms do you think are missing or not quite ready for industry use? or to put it another way, what tech are you hoping someone is building to help you and, the artists you work with today?

[00:18:16] DJay: You know, it's a tricky thing to answer because there's so many platforms out there and constantly kind of coming to fruition every single day, and it's hard.

I think one thing we didn't touch on, and maybe I'll touch on now, is there's, so much music tech out there that it's hard to know where to bring your artists.

[00:18:32] Dmitri: Yeah.

[00:18:33] DJay: And, and it's, it's difficult. Like, you know, I... There's a, platform called Playhouse that's out there right now that helps, you know, kind of generate more grassroots shows for bands.

And, you know, I understood what the platform was, but I had... You know, you have to do a call with a platform like that to really understand how to use it, and as a manager, we can only do so many calls, right? it's hard to learn about every single possible platform that exists to really be able to know if we should leverage those platforms or not.

 so, like, when I say I don't know if I wanna misspeak and say this needs to exist, 'cause there's probably a platform out there that is going to do the things that I say that I want it to do, 'cause there's so many out there. I think what, you know, a lot of platforms miss, at least the ones that I've been working on, is a lot of them don't interact enough with each other in a way that makes them more seamless.

The, the APIs on the back end, a lot of these, platforms, you know, are limiting, and I understand why they're limiting. I have my own platform. I understand the limitations of, you know, why they can't all talk to each other the way that you want them to. 'Cause, you know, you can have something that works really great with Meta and running Meta ads, but really fails at running YouTube and TikTok ads for you.

And that's something where it's like if it all was in one place and I could just run one ad and A/B test it across every single social media platform, that would be great. Maybe that platform exists. Maybe I'll learn about that after someone watches this podcast and says, "You need to check out this platform that said that, that does the thing you're saying that you need it to do."

But, you know, I think leveraging your ticket data, having access to, to more of your fan... I think one thing that maybe I should say that I think we really need is more access to data. The data that is built by our artists and off the backs of our artists is oftentimes gatekept by the ticketing companies, the promoters, whoever it might be, and that's data that really can help our artists, and I think that's really money that's being left on the floor.

You know, it's like we, we might sell, you know, 500 tickets to a show and have no idea who was at that show, and that's information that, you know, we have our Laylo sign up at the merch booth to get people to sign up for our mailing list, but, you know, maybe 1% or 10% of the people that are at the show actually sign up for our mailing list, and so we're missing data on 400 people that were there.

[00:20:54] Dmitri: Right. Yeah, I think it's th- it's those types of things where you start to use some of these tools to collect data, to target people at the right time with the right offer. That's where I see this as the potential revenue, multiplier. If you do have... If you're already registered with your PRO, your MLC, your sound exchange, you have a distributor, you have a good deal with the distribution, you feel confident that it's getting to all the DSPs and also maybe even getting some editorial playlist pitching and all that kind of stuff, you basically are saying, "The lights are on.

Somebody's home," but then you gotta add gasoline to it, right? Mm-hmm. And you gotta, you gotta say, okay, all of the... If all the revenue cylinders are firing, but you just need fans to find you or you need to, like, target them, segment them and target them better at the right moment, that's where I think I wanna take the conversation n- next.

If we look at the total value of music, the recordings, the songs, the publishing, we've got all those monetization levers in place, and we try to put a dollar figure on how much bigger that could be for those artists or for the market as a whole, simply if artists and managers and labels were really focused on growing fans, segmenting their fans, targeting their fans with the right offers.

 I'm curious, and again, you know, I know you're, you're a manager of many managers. I'm curious how much more money you think the industry could add

[00:22:13] DJay: I mean, I think it's exponential. I mean, there's so much money that is probably, out there for us to be taking. If you look at these major corporations that are running so much of the music industry that are making billions of dollars, like, and it's

I, I think if you look at that versus what the artists are making, we're losing out. If we're able to, like, leverage our fans, could you only imagine how much more money is going into the pockets of, artists and not corporations? That's where I feel like we're really losing out right now. And it,

I couldn't tell you exactly how much money that is, but if, you know, we can look at how much money Spotify's making, how much money Live Nation's making, AEG, all of these major corps, and how little a lot of the artists are making, I think it could only go up from here if we're able to leverage this data in a better way.

 you know, I would say, like, you know, an artist that right now is making $100,000 a year, if all of this was working in a better way for us to be bringing in more revenue, you know, that artist that's making $100,000 a year, which is more than a, a lot of independent artists are making, that could be a million dollars very easily for them.

[00:23:16] Dmitri: Hmm. Yeah, so I'm asking the question, like, how do you grow the pie? And you're saying, "Actually, we need the artist to be able to make a bigger slice of the pie already as it is."

[00:23:26] DJay: I mean, of course, but I think if there's ... If we're able to leverage more data, that actually helps us build that pie. You know?

[00:23:33] Dmitri: Yeah.

[00:23:33] DJay: It takes that individual piece of pie and turns it maybe into half a pie. You know? I'm not saying we necessarily need ... I mean, let me rephrase this. and before I say what I, put my foot in my mouth, like, I definitely think the corporations should be giving us, giving artists more money. Absolutely.

There's no doubt in my mind about that. But I think if there's opport- if more information about our fan bases weren't being gatekept from our artists, then could you only imagine how much more money those artists could make if they could leverage that information? If, you know, you, collect, you know, let's say 100,000

If, if 100,000 people go to your shows, of course, across a tour, but you only collect 25% of that data off those fans that are at that show, if you could collect 100%, now you have 100,000 people you could target ads to, or 100,000 people you could sell your merchandise to, or, you know, turn into followers on Spotify that then get your streaming numbers up.

I mean, it's There are tools out there. There are ways to get that data, but for independent artists, that stuff is definitely, not in front of us.

[00:24:37] Dmitri: Yeah. I feel like for the question where I asked, like, what other tech should exist, you said, "Well, there's a lot of platforms out there," but it's almost like how do you get them all to work together?

How does somebody have enough time to test them and get them-

[00:24:50] DJay: And how do you afford them?

[00:24:50] Dmitri: ... firing on all cylinders? And how do you afford them?

[00:24:52] DJay: You know, like if you have a smaller artist, you know, who is struggling to pay their rent already, like how do you pay for all these different platforms to, to collect that data for yourself?

I mean, us as managers, we can have subscriptions to all these different things, but then, you know, you have to pay for more, artists to be on them or whatever it might be. Like Chartmetric for instance, you know, like I love Chartmetric, but they're... You know, depending how much you pay, you can only collect data on so many artists.

So if you think about, like, an artist that's out there independently or smaller who, you know, doesn't want you to pay for those things for them, they have to be able to afford it at the same time.

[00:25:31] Dmitri: Yeah. I did... we have a, uh, how to start up series on this podcast that I, I did about a year or two ago that, one of the episodes I focused on was follow the money.

 it was actually just me talking. I wasn't interviewing anybody. Based on my own experience with a startup to say, you know, you really have to be close to where the exchange of money happens. So, like, if you're a data analytics platform, it's hard to charge for scaling that platform when there's actually some strategy that a manager or an artist needs to have in order to put those insights to a place that actually generates money.

 if you know what to do in the Santa Barbara situation that you described, there is a path to turning those insights into money. But the closer you are to those exchange of transactions, the easier it is to charge for your company, for your music tech service-

[00:26:20] DJay: Yeah

[00:26:20] Dmitri: ... um, as well. So this has been interesting.

Once again, you're sort of testing my interview skills by giving me answers that I sort of didn't plan for, which is totally fine. We wanna be students of the industry here. But I'm gonna push back a little bit on this idea tying us into this theme of rising tide for the whole industry.

I get that the pie distribution is part of the equation as well. But when you look at... let's just broaden out to the market as a whole. When you look at emerging ways for artists and rights holders to make money, whether it's new checks coming from, say, micro sync and social media, or fan experiences, or augmenting the music somehow, or building musical plugins that their fans could play, or even AI for fans to engage with artist-driven music, which new forms of revenue get you the most excited?

[00:27:10] DJay: You know, I think everything you just said are all things that get me excited. there's a lot of places that I think are untapped for a lot of artists to make money. I mean, even as simple as, an artist leveraging the sounds of their music into a sample pack. You know, a lot of artists don't do that.

That's a... If you could monetize and sell that, you know, like think about T-Pain, right? T-Pain f- has a very distinct voice in all of his music and I know that he's monetized that over the years. And that's like a place where, like, you could take that and you could turn that into, you know, I, I think the T-Pain sample pack already exists, but, like, that's something that a lot of artists don't even think about doing, but their fans wanna know it.

They wanna know their... You know, let's say you're using a Quad Cortex for your guitar tones, and you've figured out exactly the guitar tone that you have for your, band, and this is exactly what your sound is. Well, now you can sell that sound to be on a Quad Cortex. You know, like, these are places that I think a lot of artists aren't leveraging how important they might be to some people.

 I think that's a really interesting place. I think, you know, everything from, you know, leveraging VIP experiences, fan experiences, taking the, you know, the pop-up kind of idea and turning that into something that's curated and special and unique to you and your fan base, and then leveraging that into, a place to monetize.

people want to be connected to you, so, like, give them reasons to be connected to you.

[00:28:38] Dmitri: Nice. If you were gonna do the T-Pain effect, for sale for one of your hardcore or punk acts, what is it that they'd be selling? Would it be a guitar effect? Would it be the bass drop? What would it be?

[00:28:48] DJay: I, I think, I mean, both.

I think it's really, it's like the guitar... Like, guitar tones for instance, are such an important thing. You know, like, when you... You know, when I talk to my bands or, bands in general, And they're talking about how they want the next record to sound. They're like, "Well, I want it to sound like this band.

I love the guitar tone on this record. If I could have that guitar tone, like that would be, you know, the sound of EP or this n- next song," or whatever it might be. Like, that's a thing right there that, like, okay, well, then let's buy it. Like, you know, Slash has a guitar tone that we love.

Let's buy Slash's guitar tone and buy it off him. It's the same idea of, like, selling your, you know, your guitar tabs or something. It's like, that's something people have been doing for, for decades, but taking that to the next level in this digital era where you can actually, you know, give somebody something that they can just download onto their computer and then put into their device.

[00:29:40] Dmitri: Yeah. No, there have been some cool examples of that, but not a lot of artists have done it. I'm gonna ask you one more big-picture question, but before I do that, just tell us about Manager.cc, the platform that you're building.

[00:29:50] DJay: So Managr is basically a one-stop shop as your project management tool for your entire roster. It does everything that you would want a project management tool to do for running a music business for your artist. So you can put, input all of your show data. You can, input all of your merch data from, you know, sales from shows.

It automatically calls information in from, like, at venue reports. you can take all of your tour itineraries from your booking agent, leverage it into the platform, store all that data, give that data to your artist in a transparent way, letting them have access to see everything that you see. So if you think that, you know, a management company's running, you know, off of Apple Notes and Google Sheets and Google Docs, this kind of puts everything into one place to run the roster in a very seamless way.

We've also created a way for you to, share tour data with your artist to give them, you know, everything that they would need to know for individual shows and, you know, to collect guest lists or lodging details, just, like, the basic stuff that an artist would need to know. Like, we really, it's like a one-stop shop to just run all of your roster.

[00:30:53] Dmitri: Amazing. Sounds cool. Sounds like a good workflow tool to help with efficiency and transparency and communication. Would love to check that out sometime. So as we wrap up, I'm just curious, DJay, what tips do you have for the music industry about how we can grow the value of music, especially as it relates to audience growth?

[00:31:12] DJay: Man, it's a hard question. It's so specific. Um, you know, I think- I think we just need to continue evolving. You know, music was very cut and dry in how it was monetized in the past. And as we move forward into this new era, whether we, like AI or not, or, you know, we are dealing with these major DSPs that are, you know, taking so much profit and giving us such, such little profit, there's gotta be-- We have to continually keep learning and evolving and finding new ways to monetize the music 'cause it-- tomorrow might be a complete different scenario than today.

[00:31:49] Dmitri: It does require a lot of agility. Things are constantly changing now. It used to feel like there was a formula, and now it feels like there's no formula. Like, each artist is different, each moment in time is different.

[00:31:58] DJay: A-a-and if you look at just the basics of, thinking of, like, social media, for instance, like, what worked on social media even a month ago is different than how it works now.

And figuring out how to convert your followers and your audience into streamers today is different than how it was three years ago. So we have to just keep evolving.

[00:32:18] Dmitri: Nice. I love it. Keep evolving with DJay Brawner from Tuff Management, from manager.cc. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for coming on the show.

[00:32:25] DJay: Thank you so much.

Megh Vakharia

[00:00:00] Dmitri: Okay, we're talking about more fans buying more things. This is the marketing tech episode of Music Tectonics and the Rising Tides series, where we wanna grow revenue for all. I think it's really important to talk to people who are actually in the trenches building the technology that can help us with this.

So I have with me today Megh Vakharia, CEO of SymphonyOS. What's up, Meg?

[00:00:21] Megh: Hey, how's it going, Dmitri?

[00:00:23] Dmitri: Great to have you here. So we're gonna dive in. For anyone who doesn't know, what is SymphonyOS?

[00:00:28] Megh: SymphonyOS is the first set of, AI agents that help grow artist revenues. And so we've been in the game for 10 years.

Over the last four years we've, helped artists run 100,000 campaigns to grow their music. Um, and then most recently we kind of rolled out a set of these AIs that people can use to, you know, talk to, email, or just use basically to do anything like run ads or do influencer campaigns, do valuations, et cetera.

[00:00:53] Dmitri: Whoa. so now SymphonyOS, you're talking to agents and you can ask your email, like your marketing emails questions and like hone campaigns and things like that?

[00:01:03] Megh: More so than just to ask questions, you can execute anything, right? So I can go and be like, "Hey, Dmitri, we, uh, we just did this podcast with Dmitri.

Can you go promote it on TikTok real quick? here's a video." I just text my AI that and it has a campaign live in 30 seconds. Um-

[00:01:17] Dmitri: What the heck? Why aren't we doing that?

[00:01:19] Megh: We'll make it happen, man. I'll talk to you after this. We'll make it happen.

[00:01:22] Dmitri: Nice. Okay, interesting. All right. So for this series, we've identified fan growth as one of the eight technology multipliers of revenue for the music industry.

In what ways is technology being used to increase revenue for artists and labels from a marketing perspective?

[00:01:37] Megh: Yeah, I see it in like really two or three ways, right? I think the biggest thing is A lot of the, the industry is driven on catching signals, right? Catching moments before they happen. And I've seen it time and time again where, you know, we've had all these huge labels sometimes catch a song right as it's peaking, maybe on TikTok or Instagram.

And despite how much money they put in, they might put in 25, 50, 100K, they just caught it too late. So any of the gasoline they're pouring on doesn't actually translate and the song plateaus.

[00:02:07] Dmitri: Hmm.

[00:02:08] Megh: And so the way I see it is that, you know, from one angle, it's how do you build tools and technology that help folks, catch these signals or act on these signals much more quickly, right?

At the speed of the signal or event happening. the way I th- think about it from the other angle is accessibility, right? I think you have a lot of independent artists out there. It's, you know, more than ever in history. Um, but also a lot of amazing independent labels out there too that are starting out and maybe they don't have a media buying person in-house.

Maybe they're just amazing at the relationship piece of it or the deal-making piece of it, or have an amazing A&R ear, but they don't have an influencer person in-house. They don't know, or haven't done historically tour routing or catalog valuations, right? And so the way we see it is that technology becomes this, great equalizer.

You know, it becomes the most common denominator for a lot of these folks, especially the way we see it with AI, right? You can kinda meet someone, a manager that has five artists, has never run ads before, and turn them into a digital marketer by just giving them good AI tools that help them accomplish that.

 and then the third thing is really when you do something well, that's when you get the best results. And we know this in the industry 'cause you have amazing agencies and tools and just operators, right? They're experts at what they do. How do you turn everyone into an expert? And so I think that's the last piece with technology is when you have all these tools and platforms out there, including Symphony, that, almost take or compile best practices on how CRM or ads or a rollout kinda works, uh, you kind of also bring that knowledge to everyone else.

And from an efficiency perspective, everyone's saving money 'cause they didn't have to spend money to make those mistakes and the platform solved them.

[00:03:43] Dmitri: That's what my father-in-law calls the dumb tax. If you pay the dumb tax-

[00:03:47] Megh: Yeah

[00:03:47] Dmitri: ... like you ha-

[00:03:47] Megh: Dumb tax

[00:03:47] Dmitri: ... you only wanna pay it once. If you pay it over and over again, then you didn't learn the-

[00:03:51] Megh: It's rough

[00:03:51] Dmitri: the lesson.

[00:03:51] Megh: It's rough sometimes, you know?

[00:03:52] Dmitri: So, so tracking those signals, increasing access to, to people who wouldn't have access to this, and then really translating expertise in a way that really makes a difference, that's how you're saying technology can increase revenue. Let me ask you this: How much money are artists leaving on the table by missing marketing opportunities?

[00:04:11] Megh: So much. And it's interesting 'cause I see it at different angles, right? from at least our data, we have all these artists that are just starting out in their career and, you know, I think it's interesting 'cause I've seen these artists that they're early, right? And I think there's sometimes a conversation to be had of like, how much do I invest in my music?

Should I invest in my music? and I've seen artists literally just put 100 bucks a month into their music and turn that into a few thousand dollars a month within 12 months of doing it, just that initial investment. So I think every artist should be, at least when it comes time to marketing, at least spending the time to go in and make the content and do the things that they think are best to actually push their music.

 but I think also, like setting up the right tools, right? If it's not Symphony, then set up some agents to help you know, uh, what's working the best, what's not working the best, right? Or set up, agents to help you run your ads. I think, anything in music, the, the golden kind of ticket I've found is generally when you're earlier on, basically you can shoot in any direction and you'll find fans, right?

When you're a larger team, um, it's about where do you put that 100K most effectively, and that's also where I think, you know, a lot of labels and teams hire headcount, or maybe they don't have headcount and they can't solve those problems effectively. That's also where I think, you know, there's probably millions of dollars of potential residual catalog revenue and frontline revenue that's on the table because folks missed that moment early on, or they missed boosting that post right when they should have.

[00:05:35] Dmitri: Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. can you share some success stories of artists or labels that have used Symphony OS and what kind of ROI they generated? You talked about this h- at 100 bucks a, a month and then generate 3,000 a month if you, you follow the right cadence.

[00:05:48] Megh: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:48] Dmitri: Um, would love to hear one or two quick examples.

[00:05:51] Megh: Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. We've been blessed to have an amazing set of artists that are both independent and also, like, in the actual system, right? Like, folks like Big X the Plug from United Masters and Lil Shimmy via a, you know, label like Gamma. I think the most interesting one for me was Big X the Plug over the years actually investing in Symphony, and what basically ended up happening was we have this feature called Forever Saves where fans can go in, uh, and they can subscribe to a pre-save and then they don't have to pre-save again.

And so they had built up tens of thousands of Forever Saves over using Symphony, you know, over like maybe six to 10 releases. And what ended up happening was, I think it was his last album, "The Country Project," it had so many pre-saves saved up from day one that the second it came out, the album like debuted I think top 10 on Spotify.

And so I think about it from the perspective of all that residual work, right, that you end up doing when you're marketing that may not have that immediate ROI payoff, that turns into millions of streams six to 12 months from now. obviously we've seen a lot of interesting cases too of artists like, you know, they'll have 500 bucks, they, they got like 100 tickets to sell and they'll drop that money and they'll sell out, you know, with $300.

, But I, I'm really interested in those situations where it's like, music especially, right? Like it's really easy to be like, "All right, we ran a campaign for an e-commerce, you know, store and we generated $12 for every dollar in revenue." Music is a game of forward-looking opportunity and building that today.

And so I always look at it from the perspective of like what action today nets the most benefit even six months from now from fam- from fan building perspective. so I think when it comes to ROI, it's really just like where are you taking those dollars that you have and how are they translating in that longer term period?

[00:07:35] Dmitri: Yeah. Okay, cool. So when we widen out a little bit bigger and we talk about what's coming down the pipe, because things are changing quickly. So I've th- seen Symphony OS is changing quickly. Where are the music revenue growth areas, the revenue growth areas relating to marketing in the coming years?

[00:07:52] Megh: I think it's this concept of, like, really building a marketing flywheel.

 so the way I think about that is, like, I think sometimes we think about a lot of marketing levers in a very ad hoc way, where it's like, "Oh," like, "single came out, I gotta run the ad campaign." And then, "Oh, it's time for the m- merch drop. I gotta email my fans," right? I think folks look at it less like an engine or an always-on life cycle, right?

Like, I always have, an ad campaign running to drive email signups. I built out an automated email, you know, return replier, right? A, a drip campaign that emails a fan every single week, warms them up, right? I built out kind of another set of, uh, technology or tools that basically go in and, you know, segment my fans and find the ones that are the most engaged and email them more specifically.

So, the way I think about it is the opportunity really is, like, finding those holes in these life cycles that fans go through, and then building the tech or building the tools that kind of plug them all up, right? 'Cause at the end of the, end of the day, if a fan discovers you and gives you their email address or phone number, that's not the only touchpoint they'll have with you, right?

They're actually with you along a set period of time. But if you take action and actually inform them what's going on or kind of bring them along, they'll stay there much longer and spend more money, spend more time listening, right? So, I think that's where the opportunities really are on, on that side of things.

[00:09:12] Dmitri: I love the way you put it. it's super weaves into a lot of the conversations we had on the "Rising Tide" series, and those conversations will continue at our Music Tectonics conference. You know it's fun. We'll have a lot of good times and conversations in Santa Monica. Megh with Symphony OS. What is it, symphonyos.co is the website?

[00:09:30] Megh: symphonyos.co.

[00:09:31] Dmitri: Awesome. Looking forward to seeing you, and thanks so much for joining the podcast.

[00:09:35] Megh: Yes, sir. Thank you for having me.

Anj Fayemi

[00:00:00] Dmitri: Next up, I've got Anj Fayemi, the CEO of Rivet. Anj, how you doing?

[00:00:05] Anj: Doing really well, man. How you doing?

[00:00:07] Dmitri: I'm doing great. It's great to see you. All right, let's dive in. Tell us what Rivet is.

[00:00:12] Anj: is the revenue generation platform for the modern artist stroke brand team. So Rivet unifies data for artist teams to bring together ticketing, commerce, listenership, social data, et cetera, to power automations that really delight fans and drive revenue across their content and products all from one place

[00:00:33] Dmitri: Oh, wait a second.

I gotta ask a little bit more. That sounds really good. I always like the word delight, Anj. Your jacket is delightful. I know-

[00:00:40] Anj: Thank you

[00:00:40] Dmitri: ... but, but, um-

[00:00:41] Anj: It's

cozy, actually.

[00:00:42] Dmitri: Oh, okay, gotcha. Nice. But, um, let's get a little more specific on Rivet. Like, literally I'm a artist, a label manager, something. What is the first thing I'm doing in Rivet?

[00:00:53] Anj: First thing you're doing is you're connecting the different platforms that you're active on or that your fans are active on, so that looks like connecting your Instagram, your TikTok, your Discord if you have that, for us to understand how they're engaging with you across all those different platforms.

And then you can power automations on those platforms, but also you can do really cool things on your own channel, so that's like your emails, your SMSs, and it's kind of this orchestration layer that allows you to execute marketing and deliver great fan experiences across every channel your fan is active on.

So really taking into account where they wanna be engaged with, how they wanna be engaged with, and at scale, allowing you to personalize that.

[00:01:36] Dmitri: That sounds really cool. So it's like you get everything set up, and then you, like, do campaigns across platforms and with SMS and email all integrated.

[00:01:44] Anj: You can do campaigns, which is a big part of it, but there's also a bunch of, what we call evergreen automation, so kind of things that are just happening on autopilot in the background that are just always on, so that whether that's driving people to purchase merch on your store or people to join your mailing list or your text list or people to receive something from you every so often, those things are just always on in addition to the campaigns that you do around big launches or big releases, et cetera.

So really thinking about, as an artist, your business is on all year round, so you should have stuff going on year round in terms of delighting your fans and the people who are, interested in engaging with you. So we make that easy to have all that background stuff, and then you also have the tools for the bigger launch moments.

[00:02:32] Dmitri: Okay, cool. Well, if as we're talking you have examples you wanna share, I'd love to hear about it. for this podcast series, we've identified fan growth as one of the eight technology multipliers of revenue for the music industry. Our listeners are following along with this rising tide story, and to me, this marketing tech component is a key piece.

I'm curious, in what ways is technology being used to increase revenue for artists and labels from this marketing lens?

[00:02:58] Anj: It kind of goes back to some of the, the elements that I was talking about in the first question. It starts with really treating music and the artist as a business. Music is really behind all other industries in terms of understanding the end consumer and using that information to deliver a relevant, delightful experience, and that's for a variety of reasons.

Different elements from live to the recording to merchandising all are owned by different players and typically through different systems, and they're not designed to speak to each other. so what's changing now and really driving value for artists and labels is this new focus on zero and first-party data and working to understand that end consumer finally.

And so labels are making more of an effort to play a part in, say, touring, because that data is useful for records. And artists are increasingly working with partners who let them own their data and use it to bolster other elements of their businesses. So what this now means is that you can start to operate like that more traditional business and personalize your marketing to what your fan actually cares about, their unique level of engagement, their preferred mode of engaging.

And so that's changed a lot and that's really driving results. Community engagement via own channels, email, as I mentioned, text, Discord, et cetera, is growing, and fans are buying more directly from the artist without algorithms dictating reach, so that's also driving a lot. And artists and labels, as a result, are now seeing more fans engage with special offers because it feels more personal and they feel more involved as a result.

They're making repeat purchases on their stores, engaging with VIP experiences, even just vocally amplifying the artist's music and shows, and this is basically a free channel to grow that artist community. And so they're really seeing that impact both at that top of the funnel, just expanding the reach of what's going on in the artist ecosystem, but also bottom of the funnel when we think about conversions.

And then the last thing that I'll add here is that now that there's more robust data from all these different sources I'm mentioning, these teams are now better able to understand loyal, engaged markets and segments, and so they can optimize spend in very specific ways instead of spray and pray, one-size-fits-all approaches.

And from a live perspective, that's allowing them to optimize their tour routing, confidently sell out larger venues, leverage data to even bundle physical and digital experiences, and that increases the value of a singular fan purchase interaction. And so optimizations like that are really driving significant revenue growth, and that all comes from super serving and hyper personalizing to the fan's unique experience.

[00:05:35] Dmitri: Amazing. Wow. This guy knows what he's talking about. I love this. I feel like you've gotten to a really granular level to list off a lot of ways.

[00:05:42] Anj: You gave me too much time to prep for this.

[00:05:45] Dmitri: I mean, you brought this up about this incremental revenue as a result of these things. How much money are artists leaving on the ta-table right now by missed marketing opportunities?

[00:05:52] Anj: So the big number is, music marketing opportunities now are costing the industry, and missed marketing opportunities are costing the industry billions. And why? That's because fans are just much less likely to buy when marketing feels impersonal or solely transactional. And some of these opportunities are really easy, so things like a birthday discount like your beloved coffee shop does, or a physical postcard delivered directly to your home.

Just easy ways to build a more personalized personal relationship with your fans, that happen to also translate into more support from them. So on a micro level, without the right infrastructure in place to funnel fans into their own channels, your emails, your SMSs, your communities, artists continue to lose money by paying to re-reach their audience every time they have something.

I have a new record, I have a new launch, and then I'm just using social platforms. Without the direct channel of those emails, SMSs, et cetera, every time they launch a new tour or a product, they're missing out on at least 50% of the revenue they could have made directly from their fans in terms of merch and tickets.

And then on another level, artist teams also fall into the trap of inflated streaming numbers from viral short-form videos and, and just fail to set up the right infrastructure to turn those fan moments into long-term opportunities. A big thing we like to say is turning fan moments into momentum. And so without those right tools in place for things like retargeting, linking to other products, they aren't able to turn those moments into recurring fan activities and engagement.

So when those streaming numbers taper off sharply, there isn't any noticeable impact on their other revenue streams. And so just wanna kinda give a sense for both the live impacts, the record impacts, and the different places where they're losing revenue by not having, infrastructure set up to turn these fan moments into longer-term momentum.

[00:07:52] Dmitri: That's really where the data is kinda like the missing layer, right? Because like you have some sort of cultural moment happening and then you're like, "Well, I don't even know how to leverage that because I don't know who these people are. I don't know how to segment them. I don't know where they are. I don't know whether they're ticket buyers or streaming people or downloaders or vinyl buyers or merch, you know, leads or anything like that."

So the-- I guess I could see where that data kinda ties that into building the momentum 'cause you have to be able to reach out to them again.

[00:08:20] Anj: And, and not have to pay to do that or just go blast and hope that they see it. those things aren't repeatable. Maybe they'll work sometimes, but more often than not, even when they work, you can't repeat them.

But more often than not, they don't work.

[00:08:35] Dmitri: Cool. Can you share some success stories of artists or labels that have used Rivet and what kind of ROI they generated?

[00:08:41] Anj: my favorite question. so we have, examples like some artists that we've been able to generate over a million dollars in, 24 hours for them in direct fan sales.

 we have artists who have grown their, what we call automated merch revenue, so revenue from sort of the journeys that Rivet sets up in the background that I was mentioning for you, by three times what those automated journeys were generating for them prior to Rivet within six months. We have folks that have DM'd, individual artists have DM'd hundreds of thousands of fans, on social platforms and used that to grow their community to over 100,000 people and then launched a podcast off the back of that.

We have an example of a previously a major label signed artist who, using Rivet, had their best-selling first week, as an independent artist after going through six months of nurturing their fan base and then launching their album post that. And the last one that I'll mention is, examples where we have artists that are generating up to 38x in terms of ROAS using Rivet's zero-party data intelligence to retarget their ads, and to sell products based on those audiences and seeing 38 times, return on, on that investment.

I actually said that was the last one. I'll do another last one. we have, the last example that's very live-focused is, an artist that was able to, uh, sell out their largest ever venues, after six months of using Rivet and then see also relative to projections that they had, a 200% increase in early ticket sales, so basically selling out twice as fast.

And so just testament to, and they used a lot of the platform growing their, their lists from their social platforms, so converting that social attention into folks that they could then understand and then target better working hand-in-hand with their promoters to arm them with that intelligence to also sell those markets.

So a lot of this comes back to that data, but then real results in how quickly they were able to sell out the tour and then also see a 50% increase in per head spend from the fans that they were able to get in those venues on that tour.

[00:10:54] Dmitri: Got it. Wow, that's a lot of great examples, and I can see each use case, they're doing something a little bit differently, and probably a different use case for Rivet, but also in terms of fan engagement, figuring out what the right place is that's gonna be the multiply for that particular artist.

We gotta wrap up, but let me ask you this, Anj. Where are the music revenue growth areas relating to marketing in the coming years? Where do you think we're gonna see this growth? If I'm telling this story of rising tide and you're thinking through the marketing lens, what do you think is gonna grow things?

[00:11:22] Anj: A few things, are pretty important to note here. One, and I'm sure a lot of people are gonna say this, is the direct-to-fan expansion, so that's a huge growth lever for artists as they start to carve out more parts of their business independently and just continue to expand the number of exclusive experiences that they offer to their fans.

Fans are going to continue to want these closer connections to artists, and through those, artists can command better margins for their businesses, so it just makes sense on both sides. Community is also a huge area for growth. We've talked a lot about email, about SMS, Discord, other fan club spaces. Those will continue to grow.

But the interesting thing here is the industry is starting to get smarter about sub-communities and sorting fans at different stages within the middle of the funnel, and not just even saying middle of the funnel, but stages within that. The average spend per fan will continue to grow as the experience in that middle becomes more tailored, so I think there's a huge opportunity there as well.

And now with more unified data about fan interests and preferences at the artist team's fingertip, we can expect an explosion in net new brand partnerships being facilitated as brands continue, and we're seeing these trends Continue to look to leverage the unique fandom dynamics that exist within music, and that's even at super specific niche levels.

And so I think brand partnerships is, is also going to continue to grow as a result of this. And off the back of that, we can expect more artist-owned brands that are connected to their music to continue to grow. So completely separate product lines and that exist within an artist ecosystem, but with that deeper understanding of their fans and their interests, whether it's a run club or a coffee concept, just standalone brands that tie into artists more broadly, I think we'll see a rise of that.

At the highest scale, which we're more familiar with, you have your Fenty Beauties, your Rare Beauties, and, artists that have their completely separate standalone brands, but I think we'll see that at the mid, mid-sized artist stage at a much higher rate. And then the last thing that I'll add is I think the appetite for live is continuing to grow.

 more digital experiences are being developed to complement concerts, and so social channels now is, are just basically the cheapest and just most cost-effective advertising tool for an artist to grow globally. So I think more of these artists will go global faster, and so the demand for global touring will increase.

And so I think live will also be a big... or will be significantly impacted in a positive way going forward as a result of, those global trends. So that's-

[00:14:05] Dmitri: I, I love it.

[00:14:06] Anj: Yeah.

[00:14:06] Dmitri: Yeah, those are, those are, wow, three great suggestions of where things are gonna grow. Anj Fayemi with Rivet, it's been a blast talking to you.

Thanks so much for joining the podcast.

[00:14:15] Anj: Thank you.

Let us know what you think! Find us on LinkedIn, and Instagram, or connect with podcast host Dmitri Vietze on LinkedIn.

The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Weekly episodes include interviews with music tech movers & shakers, deep dives into seismic shifts, and more.