The electronic producer Odetari is popular on TikTok, where he has more than 2.5 million followers. He posts “maybe three to five times a week, probably even less,” according to Alec Henderson, vp of digital strategy at Artist Partner Group, which signed Odetari last year. That’s often not enough to satiate a global audience consuming social media 24/7.
So APG came up with a workaround. “A lot of what we do internally at APG is create multiple profiles for artists across social channels, and we’ll run fan pages in-house for our artists,” says Corey Calder, svp of marketing and creative services at APG. “We utilize these fan pages to continuously serve artists’ audiences with content,” Henderson adds.
The music industry has become increasingly interested in the marketing potential of these fan pages, which can churn out a lot of posts — song snippets, concert footage, backstage shenanigans, and more — but don’t cost much or require the actual artist to do more work. Some fan pages are started by ardent followers, others by the artists’ own team or label.
Trending on Billboard
Either way, they function “like having a media outlet at your disposal at all times,” says Laura Spinelli, digital marketing manager for Shopkeeper Management. For Tim Collins, co-founder of the digital marketing agency Creed Media, fan pages “can tell the story of an artist without the artist having to be the voice.”
Fan pages have existed for as long as the internet. While initially listeners had to actively seek them out and follow them, now the most popular social media platforms are all driven by powerful algorithms, which feed their users videos and posts according to their taste profile. This means that even passive supporters can be served fan pages, expanding their reach.
“You might like an official Odetari post, and then that serves information to the app that he is an interest of yours,” Henderson explains. “Our fan pages will almost eat off of that, because then the app is going to serve you more content related to that artist.”
For labels, fan pages can hopefully serve as a cost-efficient alternative to influencers. Marketers have been complaining about the saturation of advertising efforts on TikTok for years now — brands, movies, politicians and more use the platform to sell themselves. As a result, any influencers that command an audience can charge a lot more for their services, even though they generally do not get as many eyeballs as they did when the platform was less popular.
“If you’re going to do influencer marketing and you’re a label, you have to hire an agency or reach out to creators and pay them on a one-off basis to post using your song,” says Ben Klein, who runs the Hundred Days Digital marketing agency. “Instead of running a sped-up song campaign or a film-edit campaign that way, you can just launch a page” and put them out yourself.
Having all these accounts on hand — fan pages, sped-up song pages, film-edit pages, lyric pages — offers “a way to circulate catalog and help facilitate music discovery without burdening the artist or having to spend money,” Collins says.
To help promote bbno$’s “It Boy,” the rapper’s team “had close to 60 fan pages pumping one to four posts a day,” says Sam Alavi, who co-manages the artist. They covered “a myriad of different content types: Some were anime focused, some were bbno$ focused, some were clips of old podcasts bbno$ had done, and then they ended with ‘It Boy.’” The single peaked at No. 10 on Billboard’s TikTok Top 50 chart in July.
When an artist’s team runs a fan page, they don’t have to pay to post there. And when fan pages are set up by fans of the artist, they’re usually “so cheap” to work with, according to Arthur Lindsell, managing director of Grail Talent, an agency that links brands with creators. “Their dream is to get reached out to by the team of their favorite singer — give the person who runs the fan account tickets to the tour, and they’re going to be over the moon.”
Courting fan pages run by fans is the political equivalent of firing up the base. While influencers are mercenaries — their heart is in it as long as the check clears — the people behind fan pages rejoice at the opportunity to be loud advocates for their favorite artists, theoretically helping to indoctrinate others. Fan pages “sometimes can initiate interest in an artist, but most of the time they snowball it,” Lindsell says. “It’s about getting people who are slightly interested and hyping them up.”
In addition, fan pages can shift some of the burden of non-stop social media posting away from artists — or shoulder that burden entirely for those who are averse to TikTok. “A lot of artists are just not comfortable using social media,” Klein says. In that case, fan pages can serve as “a way to get your artists into a space that they might not want to participate in if they don’t want to create content,” Spinelli says.
These accounts can also post clips that artists might not want to put up themselves. “A lot of artists want their personal account to stay curated,” says Jen Darmafall, a director at ATG, a management company and marketing agency that runs fan pages for some of its clients. “There’s a lot of content that will be captured at shows, for instance, that they might not want to post on their main account because it will look a little spammy.” The fan pages can function as a spam cannon.
While they can do quantity, some marketers fear fan pages don’t always produce the eye-catching posts necessary to hook new listeners. “When you find the kid who makes the best film edits on TikTok, he’s probably 16 years old, and he just really likes the aesthetic of Ryan Gosling movies, for example,” explains Jake Houstle, co-owner of Black 17 Media, The Orchard’s top TikTok label. “I would much rather pay that kid $50 to create six Ryan Gosling edits for my song,” and hope that his passion for the actor transforms into truly standout posts.
Fan pages face one other challenge. An artist already has to have genuine followers for them to be helpful — otherwise there’s no signal to amplify. If fans could be created out of thin air, everyone would be a star.
“There’s a threshold of how popular the artist needs to be,” Lindsell acknowledges. “No one really gives a shit if something feels obviously manufactured.”
