Industry Begins Embracing True Fans, Super Fans, Core Fans As An Alternative Way To Fund Creators
from the just-as-some-of-us-predicted dept
Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) concluded with a look at “true fans,” an alternative way of funding creators that avoids the main problems of the current copyright system. The approach is based on nurturing the connection between artists and their most dedicated fans, allowing the former to generate extra revenue by providing the latter with tailored offers. When the book appeared in 2022, the idea of “true fans” was not widely known, but since then, the idea has been gaining currency and supporters. One of the best-known names in the world of fan-supported creativity is Patreon. A couple of months ago, it published its “State of Create 2025” report, which surveyed over 1,000 creators and 2,000 fans to learn more about both and their interrelationship.
According to Patreon’s research, “over half of the $290 [billion] that encompasses today’s creator economy comes from direct-to-fan value like ticket sales, courses, livestreams, and paid memberships.” Moreover, it’s not just financial support that true fans – or “core fans” as Patreon calls them – offer their artists:
Core fans are more likely to energize the rest of a creator’s community by engaging with other fans. In doing so, they can help snowball the fandom into a community that generates value on its own, even when the creator is not posting new work.
Not only does this added value make the community even more appealing for newer fans to want to join, it also takes the pressure off of the creator to be constantly creating.
As a result, Patreon believes:
Creators are overwhelmingly seeking out more ways to deepen connections with their biggest fans. That’s not to say follower count isn’t important to creators – it’s just not the only end goal any more. The new driver motivating creators to build a large follower count is to have more chances to turn followers into fans, and fans into core fans.
According to Patreon’s research, 74% of creators want more fan interaction, and 87% of them value the importance of having a fan community around their work. Of course, Patreon has a vested interest in promoting the idea of true fans and their value to creators, since it makes its money by acting as an intermediary between them. But it is striking how even the biggest and most successful media companies are joining the true fan fan club.
One big name that embraced the direct-to-fan approach some while back is Universal Music Group, as Walled Culture noted last year. There is no sign of any diminished enthusiasm for the idea in Chairman and CEO Sir Lucian Grainge’s annual New Year note to UMG staff, where he writes about the company’s “superfan” strategy:
In 2025, we’ll also be reaching out in new ways to engage fans. In addition to listening to their favorite artists’ music, fans want to build deeper connections to artists they love. Last year, in accelerating our direct-to-consumer and superfan strategy, we formed a strategic partnership and became an investor in NTWRK and Complex to build a premium live-video shopping platform for superfan culture. This year will see us expanding our product offerings to fans, as we continue to redefine the “merch” category and create superfan collectibles and experiences.
Weverse is another established “superfan” platform, one that comes from the K-pop giant Hybe Corporation. According to Weverse’s 2024 Global Fandom Trend Report:
the platform’s user base grew consistently across all continents, with an average growth rate of 19% last year.
Sixteen separate global artist teams joined Weverse during the year, with high-profile international stars like Ariana Grande, Dua Lipa, Megan Thee Stallion, and Conan Gray driving double-digit user growth across North America, Europe, and Asia.
Other well-known industry giants are planning new offerings for true fans. Warner Music Group is building a “superfan app”, and Spotify is working on something called “superfan clubs”. Meanwhile, true fan business models are thriving in China, reported here by Music Business Worldwide:
Tencent Music Entertainment, China’s largest music streaming company, is also banking on superfans to grow its business. The company recently reported a significant surge in its paying user base and improved average revenue per paying user (ARPPU), which was partly boosted by its ‘Super VIP’ (SVIP) tier.
As this indicates, the true fans idea has entered the mainstream now. That is good news for artists seeking to connect with their fans, and to generate extra income from that deeper relationship, but there’s an underlying problem, despite this embrace of the idea by big names. In an excellent discussion of the Patreon “State of Create 2025” report on her Posting Nexus blog, Julia Alexander points out a fundamental challenge facing the true fans model. Services like Patreon provide a way for true fans to support the artists they love, but they don’t help creators find those true fans in the first place. For that, big platforms like YouTube and TikTok are needed, but they make it hard for people to move across to true fan sites in order to support artists directly. As Alexander writes:
If the Instagrams, YouTubes, and TikToks of the world want creators to continue putting in the effort of full-time labor to produce videos, they need to make it easier for those creators to survive off of smaller audiences. That only happens by encouraging core fans to follow their absolutely favorite creators to third-party websites where those creators can maintain a stronger direct-to-fan relationship rather than the simple direct-to-consumer one that isn’t working as the creator economy grows.
What that means is that these platforms need to understand that it is in their own interest to make it easy for visitors to become true fans using established sites like Patreon and the new ones that are being launched. Making it hard to do that in a misguided attempt to maximize the time that people spend on sites like YouTube and TikTok will ultimately harm the creators they depend on. Whether they are called true fans, core fans or superfans, they are vital for the future of creativity, not least in a world beyond copyright.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.
Filed Under: business models, core fans, creators, crowdfunding, direct to fan, super fans, true fans
Companies: patreon, umg
Comments on “Industry Begins Embracing True Fans, Super Fans, Core Fans As An Alternative Way To Fund Creators”
Hey, Jack Dorsey said to delete all IP laws and Elon agreed with him, meaning that it can be done politically.
CYOA time! Are you ignoring that because
– You don’t want to admit Elon did something good
– You actually don’t want copyright gone, just want to endlessly whine about it existing
– You think wanting copyright gone is a fascist thing to do
Re:
“CYOA time! Are you ignoring that because”
We are ignoring this just to piss you off.
Re:
As always, the best possible way to get me to ignore one of the stories I have open in my (checks) 730 open tabs of things I’d like to write about, is to insist that I’m ignoring a story for some stupid fucking reason.
Thanks. I can now skip covering that one.
Until you’re my editor, you don’t get to tell me what to write about.
So kindly go fuck off.
Meaning a fan without the ability to pay for the stuff they love can never be a true fan, I guess. Nice mischaracterization.
Sounds like a way wealthy people can spend their money, leaving the rest of us in the dust. No thanks.
Re:
I mean, you know you could say the same thing about concerts, books, music and art purchases, and…basically any means of fans compensating creators for their work, right?
Re: Re:
TBF, people have been saying the same thing about access due to stuff like rising ticket costs (never mind VIP tickets) and the like for a long time.
It would be nice if sites made passthrough easier, but on the other hand, the bar is pretty low already. Lazy fans are not the big target here. It would be nicer if the sites that offer support mechanisms internally did not skim so much off the top though, for sure.
Let us also hope that the old guard, who will never change, while embracing fan-centric models do not enshittify the model so much that the rest must follow.
Re: Lazy? fans
Unfortunately chasing the true fans does lead to enshitification, the artist pushes resources and time towards keeping the true fans happy and a easy shortcut is delaying things for the non true fans.
then you have groups like file770 where if your not a true fan your not a fan at all and do not belong in their group or voting for their awards.
Generally I know that the artist is just trying to chase a few more dollars, but I ignore all supplications. if owning 90-100% of their books is not enough, oh well.
Its not about being lazy ,its disagreement with the whole true fan system.
Re: Re:
i see i was not clear in my context.
Lazy: Can’t manage to click a link to look at another site. Obviously not much of a fan. People frequently offer multiple ways to supoort by tipping and subscribing.
To be clear, i mean people who can afford to do so. People who cannot are not the potential market, and that’s perfectly fine.
If ThemTube wants to stay relevant they need to stop murdering the talent. Creator after creator is seemingly randomly “shadow-deprioritized” or whatever it should be called, the engine of youtube suggested viewing algos and/or secret behind the scenes control levers functioning to not notify viewers of their favored subscribed creators new content despite jumping through all the hoops, clicking the bell, etc.
This is on top of and added to the seemingly faceless and mindless whims of the algorithm and moderation staff, where even top youtubers have to hope that they can scrape up a response from a creator contact by creating a big outcry or a lucky reddit thread and anyone who is not a recognized brand gets silence or automated responses that are less helpful than silence.
Currently the life path is to get an audience and then bail over to nebula or create your own streaming service and subscription model or get an audience, fall victim to a voodoo curse and have none of your videos show up even for subscribe+bell fans, have your metrics drop, payments evaporate and you go back to doing whatever you used to do.
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Their onsite search also sucks gravel. More than search in general, even specifying exact channel names or video titles. It’s weird as hell.
Great in theory, in practice it’s a parasocial nightmare.
What do you think these creators might have to do for money? It’s also speculation: the creator creates for nothing but hope. Then if they fail it’s their fault.
They’re creators, not marketers. You’re asking them to perform hard labor, in public, and maybe get paid. No thanks.
Female creators + direct to fan = what could go wrong?
That’s the line they all missed. The unspoken warning at the bottom of every platform’s sales pitch. Because the fantasy sounds bulletproof: be your own boss, monetize your art, go direct to the people who love you. Cut out the suits, the middlemen, the algorithms. Just make great work, show up, and let the “true fans” carry you.
But when you’re a female creator, “direct to fan” isn’t just a revenue model — it’s a risk vector.
Because the moment you cut out the gatekeepers, you also cut out the insulation. And now it’s just you and them — the fans, the stans, the simps, the lurkers, the silent investors. They see your art, sure. But they also see your face, your hair, your lighting, your smile. They hear your voice. They watch you cry. They know where you live. Not literally (yet), but energetically — they know when you’re slipping, they know when you’re broke, they know when the performance starts to bleed into reality.
And you trained them to know that. The platforms trained you to train them.
So what happens next? You sell more than your work. You start selling your self. You start monetizing vulnerability. You’re not just an artist anymore — you’re a persona. A brand. A character that fans “know” better than your own friends. And if you dare to pull back, if you stop sharing, if you stop responding, if you stop oversharing?
They punish you. They unsubscribe. They ghost. Or worse, they lash out.
This is not a theoretical risk. This is the standard trajectory now. A woman tries to be a singer, or a writer, or a voice. She opens up just enough to build momentum. A few fans turn into a few hundred. Then the money doesn’t match the work, so she opens a little more. She shows a little more skin, a little more sadness, a little more of the behind-the-scenes she once kept private. And the algorithm rewards her — right up until it doesn’t.
And what happens then?
The fans feel betrayed. They think she changed. They think she owes them more. Some of them start to believe they were promised something. Access. Time. A reply. A piece. Something intimate. Something real. They don’t know where the line is — because the business model blurred it on purpose.
And that’s when things go sideways.
Because once a fan believes they’ve bought a piece of you, they don’t give it back. If they can’t have more of you, they’ll settle for controlling the narrative around you. They’ll whisper, they’ll accuse, they’ll turn on you. Or worse, they’ll wait for you to fall and call it karma.
Direct-to-fan doesn’t liberate the female creator. It exposes her. It wraps her in a monetized performance of closeness, then punishes her for not being available 24/7.
There’s no manager to protect her. No label to deflect the weird energy. No publicist to control the story. Just her, in a room, with a phone — and a thousand invisible eyes expecting her to perform connection until someone breaks.
The system sells empowerment. But what it delivers is emotional gig work dressed up in “community.” It’s a dating app, a storefront, and a therapy session rolled into one — and it never ends.
And yet the platforms keep saying it works.
Because for the platforms, it does.
For her?
It’s a slow bleed.
Re:
y’know, you’re right.
We need to exploit male creators more. A lot more.