Artist Fan Club - Boon or Boondoggle?

Moderator: Mark Weiss, Artist Arena
Charlie Brusco, Alliance Artists
Harlan Frey, Roadrunner Records
Chris Guggenheim, All Access Today
Moss Jacobs, Nederlancer Concerts
Steve Kirsner, HP Pavilion
David Marcus, Ticketmaster
Mark Montgomery, echo music
  • Steve Kirsner, Moss Jacobs, Mark Montgomery, Harlan Frey, David Marcus, Mark Weiss, Chris Guggenheim and Charlie Brusco

    • Alot has changed since the days of fan clubs by mail or fax.

    Nowadays, most fans likely associate their favorite artist's fan club with the respective Web site. The panel centered on the pros and cons of the fan club and how to make sure it's more of a blessing than a curse.

    The consensus was that it's important above all to engage the fans while doing the right thing for each particular artist - and that the artist must be involved in the fan club for it to be a success. Topics of note during the panel included the threat of brokers invading fan clubs and what components make up a good fan club.

    Moderator Mark Weiss of Artist Arena kicked off the panel by asking the group to simply define what a fan club entails.

    Mark Montgomery of echo music explained that he doesn't use the term fan club as he feels it's too traditional and limited.

    "I look at the dot.com as the hub of the artists' business going forward," Montgomery said. "I think that fans that are engaged in the 'fan club' business are the most important consumers we have.

    "We represent Kanye West, a totally different business than representing Faith Hill. They're completely different animals. ... At the end of the day, the way we try to build our business model is tying our clients' success to ours. And if they're successful, inevitably so are we. So you have to look at that individual business model and say, 'What's best for this client?' Not, 'Are we in the fan club business or are we not in the fan club business?'"

    Weiss said, "People are saying the fan club is too cheap with what is being offered. What is good content?"

    Ticketmaster's David Marcus said, "Downloads, streams, games, mobile, whatever it is - it's about engagement.

  • Harlan Frey
    • "I think the idea that it can be either [a boon or a boondoggle] is problematic for me. It should always be a boon. If an artist is serious about having a business career you need to find a way to engage your fans online. If you're not doing it well, that's detrimental to your brand, to your career."

    Roadrunner Records' Harlan Frey said, "Don't just make tickets the fan club. Make it more. The more we can all do collectively to deliver for fans the promise of a fan club, the more this opportunity to connect directly with fans will grow. ... I think part of that is making sure we have so many different ways to rally around the offering, instead of it just being the ticket. If we're just going to make the ticket be the offering, forget it - it's going to be a lame fan club."

    Chris Guggenheim of All Access Today said, "There's other ways you can do fan clubs," as he held up a matchbox twenty USB wristband. "This is a component that we created to extend the brand. People can buy this at a live show or retail. At the end of it is a USB drive that can activate the fan club membership. It's a lot more than just an online subscription. There's a whole world behind door number two and that's what's exciting about it."

    Weiss said, "One question that comes up - 'Should you charge for the fan club, yes or no?'" The answer, he said, is that "The sites that operate for free are a nightmare, open to hackers and porn."

    Moss Jacobs of Nederlander brought up one of the downsides of a fan club, what can go wrong when a fan club demands that a promoter set aside X number of tickets for the fan club.

    "And before the day of onsale is over, you see those tickets, that you fought with them about over the location and the quality, are already being re-sold on the secondary market," Jacobs said. "My perception is that the big brokers are members of many, many, many fan clubs and they look for those opportunities in the bigger markets to do that all the time."

  • Charlie Brusco
    • Weiss, said, "A great many of our fan club clients can't sell out arenas, let alone sell out clubs. In fact they would love to have a broker problem. A lot of bands we work with are trying to use fan clubs just to gain awareness and are doing meet and greets and things like that just to sell tickets."

    Steve Kirsner, the director of booking and the event manager at the HP Pavilion, asked the panel, "How many artists are involved" in their respective fan clubs and added that, the "smart ones are involved."

    Marcus said, "Otherwise, it's a boondoggle."

    Charlie Brusco of Alliance Artists said, "If an artist isn't involved very, very quickly, fans become not involved with the site. If they're not getting anything back out of it, then they leave."

    Last updated March 26, 2008  Click to go back to Schedule Page