Paris • New York
Fans to Customers
Music & Entertainment. Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, Believe, Live Nation, Paris La Défense Arena. 2022 to present.
Three majors, one shift: fans stopped being an audience and became a customer base.
The challenge
For twenty years the industry optimised for streams and reach. A release was measured in impressions, and the people behind those impressions belonged to the platform, never to the label. Labels built stores, mailing lists and fan clubs, but the place where fans actually spend their attention, the feed and the inbox, stayed a broadcast.The cost of that is invisible until you look for it. Millions of likes, comments and story replies land every month and disappear. No consented contact, no first-party data, no way to reach the same person for the next drop without paying for them again. An artist can have ten million followers and still rent every conversation with them.
The strategy
Move social from reach to relationship, and make the DM the channel where that relationship lives. Not a support inbox, a commercial one.Every interaction becomes an entry point. A comment under a release post, a story reply, a keyword, a like on an announcement: each one opens a conversation, captures a consented contact, qualifies it, and hands it back to the label as first-party data. The conversation then carries the thing the fan actually wants, whether that is the pre-save, the ticket, the vinyl or the early access to a merch drop.
The second move is structural. Label accounts, artist accounts and owned media were rebuilt around the same channel, so the audience is no longer rebuilt from scratch at every release. What used to be a campaign became a base that compounds.
What was built
Conversational flows for launches, merch, ticketing and releases, in four languages and across several territories.Consent capture and qualification inside the conversation, with the data flowing into the company’s own CRM rather than a platform dashboard.
Segmentation by artist, by market and by behaviour, so a push reaches the people it concerns instead of the whole list.
Re-engagement pushes at each new release, to a base that already opted in.
The hard part
The technical work was the easy half. The real argument was internal: asking an industry built on distribution to measure success in customers rather than impressions. That means changing what a campaign report looks like, who owns the relationship between the label and the fan, and what a release is judged on. Every territory had that conversation again, with different people.Where it stands
What started as a pilot in one market now runs across several territories in Europe and North America, with the same labels rolling the model out country by country, roster by roster. Four of the biggest players in the category are running the same play. At that point it is not a campaign, it is a shift.What it changes
A label that owns its relationship with fans stops buying the same audience twice. The next release starts with a base instead of a budget, and the artist keeps a direct line to the people who actually show up.Back to home