Building loyalty: Applying lessons from a 20-year-old future popstar ⭐️
Caity Baser is converting her day ones into lifelong fans through a combination of fan-first pricing and digital innovation, providing an important example for rightsholders in the process.
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Getting ready to go on tour, Caity Baser had a problem.
With a fan base full of teenagers and 20-something year-old students, bank accounts drained from festive spending sprees, and a cost-of-living crisis causing cutbacks on discretionary spending, there was almost nothing conducive to her selling out venues across the UK and Ireland.
Wanting as many of her fans to be able to join, Baser insisted on capping ticket prices at £10 (apart from London, where tickets will be £15), a move which appears to be around half the price of other comparable artists.
"Growing up, going to a gig was something I wasn't able to do that regularly [due to the cost],” explained Baser, who is only 20 years old herself. “I feel like now, being on the stage performing, I want to make gigs for everyone to come to as many times as they want. Cuz at the end of the day the most important thing to me is having them there," she added.
Going down the affordability route is something that has also been a priority for other musicians such as Tom Grennan and, to an even more extreme level, J. Cole, who went on tour in 2013 selling tickets for a dollar.
The idea of leaving money on the table may seem far-fetched for some. However, it is important to recognise that J. Cole’s Dollar & A Dream tours turned his day ones into lifelong customers. An ambition that is surely shared by Baser and her team.
Let Trapital’s Dan Runcie break down the thesis in a bit more detail:
“Many artists and companies follow the 1,000 True Fans theory: to earn $100,000, you only need 1,000 fans who consume your work enough to equal $100 in profit per fan per year. J. Cole might have converted 60,000 day-ones into true fans from the Dollar & A Dream Tour alone.”
Runcie approximates that, “If we assume [costs of] $150,000 per each of the 19 stops, that’s almost $3 million in total. Based on estimates, each small concert venue had an average of 3,000 fans. Across 19 stops, that’s nearly 60,000 day-ones who had their dreams come true. If we spread the $3 million across 60,000 fans, Cole created lasting connections with each fan for only $50. These connections become lifelong relationships—translating to future concert, album, and merchandise sales.”
Though she is subsidising less of the cost than J. Cole, Baser could reasonably expect that her gesture of goodwill towards her fans has similar ramifications.
The Brighton-based pop singer is building up trust and loyalty among her own day ones and, in turn, potentially converting them to lifelong fans – fans who go on to buy her future concert tickets, albums, and merchandise.
Whether or not that transpires, we will have to see. However, Baser and her team will have a unique front row view.
That’s according to James Morrison, Co-Founder and CEO of planet, a data infrastructure and analytics platform used by Baser and her team to form a two-way relationship with her fan.
“I can say first hand that Caity and her team have really thought through long term fan loyalty and are building this from all angles,” explains Morrison. “The pre-sale for this tour was run entirely through her fan pass meaning she now has a direct relationship with her earliest fans that can be reached free from algorithms giving the control to make more decisions like this and the ability to personalise the experience.”
This approach, Morrison explains, takes inspiration from the loyalty schemes employed by the airline industry and the resulting impact that their better-connected experience has on revenues. However, rather than being overly transactional or asking fans to download an app, they have instead focused on a pass.
“Apps had become too cumbersome for many of the acts we were talking to,” explained Morrison. “We found that the pass would persist well before and beyond events [and that it] has good adoption due to the digital wallet already being on the majority of devices [such as the Apple Wallet] and very low uninstall rates as it’s more of a digitally enabled free membership token which we send personalised push notifications to. The benefit is that it becomes a channel rather than an app that needs to be filled with content.”
It’s rare to see anyone in sports or entertainment take this long-term approach to relationship building and being genuinely fan-first. Of course, there are examples. The Atlanta Falcons previously popularised the idea of fan-centric pricing alongside their move into the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in 2016. I also know first-hand that Tottenham Hotspur already use a pass stored in a digital wallet to upload tickets for One Hotspur members, too.
However, this example from Baser identifies the next step in the evolution of this strategy. It provides an important lesson for rightsholders in combining both fan-first pricing with building up a digital picture of the audience.
As with this future popstar, I believe this is especially pertinent for rightsholders with (or wanting to attract) younger fans and challenger leagues emerging on the scene and looking to convert their day ones into loyal, lifetime customers.
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