Engaging Live Music Fans

Is set.live the future?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about ways that fans can be engaged with that is mutually beneficial rather than extractive and exploitative. This is partly an attempt to curb my cynical bent, but also because I believe something better is possible.

Live shows feel incredibly underutilized when it comes to connecting with fans. I’ve been heralding a return to the newsletter of yore, inspired by those days when you could sign up at the merch table, but the logistics of it all doesn’t scale very well.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I attended The Backfires show this weekend to find that they used set.live to gather the contact information of audience members.

The conceit in this case was that you could win a shirt and polaroid, all you had to do was find one of the flyers distributed throughout the venue and scan the code, following the simple instructions.

It was quite seamless. No app to download. The sign up was concluded with a reminder to save their new album on your platform of choice, and followed up with a text message. I’ve been thinking that texts are a good supplement to the old-school newsletter, so it was nice to see it in action.

It’s not revolutionary, but it is targeting a very specific subset of fans and meeting them where they are. The well-known problem with all social sites is visibility and reach. And the more widespread usage is, the more work it is to set up and maintain official accounts on relevant platforms. How do you even determine whether a platform is relevant?

Being able to contact fans directly, without making them sign up for a new service or download an app is a good thing. I still get newsletters from select artists whose output I’d never hear about otherwise.

To be clear, I am not endorsing set.live wholesale: all I know about it comes from their website and my single experience using it. What I’m endorsing is this model of fan engagement and the way it functions. All of my ideas would require some sort of technology to implement, and the existence of this platform suggests that it may be more feasible than I would’ve previously thought.

Judging from the case studies on their site, various artists have used it in different ways. Saint Motel and All Time Low had audience members vote on songs to include in the set list. Miranda Lambert put a signed guitar up for grabs. Home Free allowed fans to purchase merch from their spot in the crowd. Jelly Roll offered the chance of a signed poster, and followed up with a survey, something I think can be quite useful.

I think this could be used for meet and greets as well (something EDM duo Slander apparently did), or even ticket upgrades. Certain acts are known to have a lottery for the pit, which requires a lot of effort whereas in theory, having people check in on their cellphones to enter a draw reduces the workload.

What I didn’t see mentioned on the site, but I think is worth considering: asking fans to share the photos and videos they’ve taken with you. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot as a way to engage and benefit from fan efforts.

This would serve two purposes, archival¹, and potential use for tour compilations. Imagine going to a show that rocks your world, and being pinged afterward that there’s a video compilation of that specific show. While the complaint about phones at shows is always that no one looks at that stuff afterward, that is simply not the case.

Videos and photos make their way online, become gifs, get incorporated into TikToks and reels and YouTube compilations. The majority of a fan base might not engage with it, of course, but we’re not dealing with the majority, are we? And this type of content also acts as a gateway into fandom. To not take advantage of it is madness.

That’s not even accounting for the live streamers who broadcast the full shows to the digital masses that couldn’t attend the show. This is the stuff that sustains fandoms.

I’d go so far as to say that I strongly believe some acts would benefit greatly from having their shows streamed on a regular basis. I say this as someone who got up in the middle of night to watch My Chemical Romance perform during their Projekt Revolution stint—and I wasn’t the only one.

Now that’s engagement. Stats collected from Louis Tomlinson’s first tour stop in 2022.

But I digress.

Having geographically underpinned data also helps for future tours, but also to provide early access to shows (or secret shows!). The way the ticketing infrastructure currently works is a sore point for many fans, and there are ways this can be revolutionized. Knowing exactly where the fans that will actually come out to shows is incredibly valuable information. As I’ve noted before—judging from fandom on Tumblr, who often find themselves in very high percentiles of listeners, there is very little overlap with the crowd that actually comes out to shows.

I’ve got a pretty busy concert schedule coming up, so I’m going to be keeping an eye out for this and other engagement methods. If you’ve encountered set.live or another type of audience engagement at shows recently, feel free to tell me about it!

1. People like to say that the internet is forever, but as someone who has run and frequented fan sites for over two decades, there is so much that has been lost to the void because of the temporary nature of online communities.

I’ve come to the conclusion that artists should do their best to collect and store all photos and videos of them that are out there. Fan run galleries and the like are nice, but at some point they will disintegrate, and you’re left with 50x50 thumbnails scraped through the Internet Archive, and even that site is currently in peril.