Artists shouldn’t run their own communities
Artists shouldn’t run their own communities.
Superfans should run them instead.
The most prolific artist communities in the past 50 years belong to artists who tactfully empowered their superfans to run it for them.
Whether it’s Taylor Swift masterfully sharing intimate details of her life with fans, sparking superfan “folklore” on the internet, or the Grateful Dead allowing bootleg concert recordings, leading to a viral community of fan sharing…these artists never ran their own communities; they uniquely empowered superfans to.
Because each fanbase can be so different — general online artist community platforms have not had a great track record.
One notable success story, however, can be found in an unsuspecting place: Reddit
Today, there are 150+ artist subreddits which have surpassed 50k active members.
And yet how many of these larger subreddits are run by the artist?
Zero
Superfans create and run these massive communities. And they’re damn good at it too.
Despite this common thread of ‘superfan led’ communities…we’ve noticed new “artist community platforms” launching every year.
These platforms have led with the same mistake: a top-down approach ⬇️
Top-down approach ⬇️: Launching a community with the artist (+ their team) as the founding member
A platform launches starting with an artist relationship. The artist promotes the platform to fans on socials. A small percentage of those fans sign up for this foreign platform, and even fewer retain.
Two reasons the top down approach fails:
1. Artists and their teams are usually not great online community moderators.
2. This approach views all fans as the same. It’s the artist, and the fans. Two groups. Fans don’t want to be seen as just fans. They want to express their individuality. They’re not just a credit card.
The alternative is a bottoms-up approach ⬆️
Bottoms-up approach ⬆️: Launching a community with the superfans as the founding members
Reddit was founded on this approach, with communities created by everyday people. Features like karma points and moderator roles were built to enhance unique user contributions. Users joined several communities, participating in conversations across their entire taste spectrum.
TLDR; History shows that any successful artist community platform will embrace a bottoms-up approach ⬆️ led by empowered superfans.
The key question is: “How do you get a critical mass of superfans to show up for a bottoms-up approach?”.
My answer: Build a ‘trojan horse’ which gets superfans to show up for another reason.
One approach: build cool ways for music fans to express their music taste.
At Anthems, we’ve acquired over 2 million superfans without a single artist relationship by following this approach
*Note from the author: I’ve got a ton of superfan acquisition learnings, and am now exploring ways to collaborate and help others build.
Shoot me a dm if you want to brainstorm ways to build a more equitable world for artists, led by superfan growth hacks 📈
