You’ve Got a Fan Club? Network and Mobilize It
By BEN SISARIO
Published: March 2, 2011
A few social media early birds found a new kind of recorded message on their smartphones on Monday: “Good morning,” said a woman in a soft, deep voice. “It’s February 28th, 2011 A.D. We’re on planet Earth; some of us, anyway.”
The woman on the recording was the singer Erykah Badu, and she spoke through FanTrail, a new application for the iPhone that will make its official debut this month at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex. Its developers hope to usher in the next phase of social networking, allowing musicians to tap social networks for useful and possibly valuable information about their fans.
Like MySpace or Facebook, FanTrail, which also has an Android version in the works, gives artists a simple template for creating an online home, in this case a free mobile app to keep in touch with fans. But FanTrail also includes several innovations that reflect the entertainment industry’s growing need to control the white noise of social networks.
One function, called LoveMail, allows musicians to record short audio messages to fans, a touch that the company, also called FanTrail, sees as more personal than artists’ sometimes ghostwritten Twitter feeds. Another feature, LoveMeter, ranks fans’ loyalty by measuring their activity in buying music and checking in at concerts.
All that love has real dollars-and-cents value, and for Joel Rasmussen, one of the developers, FanTrail solves one of social networking’s most persistent problems: distinguishing true, money-spending fans from all the rest.
On older social media platforms, the artist “doesn’t know if you friended once on Facebook and then walked away, or if you’ve been to every show and know the producer on every album,” said Mr. Rasmussen, 40, who produced and co-wrote a 2006 documentary about the industry’s problems, “Before the Music Dies.”
“This gives artists and fans a new tool to build that relationship to a level that hasn’t been possible before,” he added.
Using FanTrail, artists can tailor messages or commercial offers to specific groups of fans, identified by location or LoveMeter ranking. For instance, a band touring in Chicago might invite only its biggest fans there to a secret show, or offer them premium merchandise. A virtual tip-jar allows artists to collect extra money from fans or raise donations for their favorite cause.
Calling it a “psychographic GPS,” Richard Nichols, the manager of the Roots, imagined that FanTrail could be used for advanced forms of crowdsourcing like testing out new tracks on only the biggest and most loyal followers.
Joshua McClure, 37, Mr. Rasmussen’s partner in FanTrail, considered perhaps more fundamental questions about the types of communication that will happen on the service:
“Imagine what Eminem is going to say,” he said. “Imagine what a drunk drummer is going to say.”
For its first stress test, FanTrail is being offered to each of the 2,200 bands at South by Southwest, with a sweepstakes that will give a free recording session and $40,000 in equipment to the group that builds the largest following. That following is defined, market-capitalization style, as a group’s number of FanTrail users multiplied by their average LoveMeter score, so an act with a smaller but more active following could beat another that has a lot of dormant fans.
FanTrail’s offerings overlap with those of several other companies. Mobile Roadie also builds apps for musicians, for example, and TopSpin Media has a broad portfolio of new media services for bands like organizing fan information and managing content rights. SkyGrid Groups, introduced last month, gives acts a way to bring together their fans’ scattered conversations from around the Web.
FanTrail has already raised more than $250,000 in seed money from the founders and others, Mr. Rasmussen said, and is in the process of raising more investment.
The company’s main source of income will be advertising, along with a cut of any sales made through the app, and it has developed a payment system that will reward artists when their fans use it to buy music and other merchandise. Apart from the standard royalties an artist would receive from a sale on iTunes or Amazon, FanTrail will pay an additional cut that increases with his or her LoveMeter score.
Ms. Badu signed up as the service’s first user, and she send her first message on Monday, after returning from a tour in Australia.
“The old music business is a troglodyte-ish system,” she said in an interview. “It’s still run at some companies like it’s 1950, using the same tools. This is another tool, probably the best I’ve seen as far as social networking to centralize fans and build support.”
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