Creators winning over Gen -Z
Research Objective
Provide a foundational understanding of creators’ approach to connect with a Gen Z audience to identify investment opportunities to support the creators’ needs in this space. This research aimed to inspire and inform the Spotify Music Vertical’s vision for 2022 and beyond.
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This project was a collaboration between three user researchers. Responsibilities for qualitative research were shared equally, I was soley responsible for concept testing and my colleague led the quantitative research.
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What are creators that are winning Gen Z doing differently across creation, marketing, connection, and monetization?
What are they missing?
How has the music industry evolved in response?
How does Spotify fit in?
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Qual research: US and Europe
Ideation workshop + concept testing
Global qual + quant research: US/Europe, LATAM, APAC
Key Opportunity Areas
Fan Communities
Gone are the days of the fan club. Today younger fans are building their own fan communities on social platforms like discord where they can geek out on the music they love. Artists are responding by being involved in these communities and responding to fan feedback.
Direct, Intimate Communication
Today’s up and coming artists are connecting with their fans in more intimate ways than ever before. They open up about their real lives and invite their fans to engage whether that be responding to comments or hosting private zoom meetings with t their biggest fans.
Authentic Marketing
Gen-Z can easily sniff out contrived or forced marketing campaigns and are resistant to it. Instead, they prefer organic marketing and unpolished content that feels real. Artists and labels are responding by increasing micro-influencer marketing and leaving the traditional release drop behind.
Fan Communities
Fan Communities
“Before Gen Z, I don't think fostering community between fans was as much of a focus as it is now. Maybe what that looked like before was just a fan club. And even now, with the emergence of new technologies, I feel what a fan club looks like for Gen Z is completely different.”
— Artist Marketer
Fan Communities
Creators recognize the value in fan connection and the power of fandom advocacy that fan communities can unlock.
Fan Community Success Criteria:
It goes beyond the music
It fosters fan-to-fan connection/communication
It feels exclusive and rewarding
Sometimes it has some level of artists presence
It brings fan and artists to the same level; fans as stakeholders, not just consumers
Expands beyond the digital world
Fan Communities
Of all the features that could help creators win Gen Z, creators ranked fan communities as the highest priority.
Fan Communities
"We have a Telegram group with our dearest fans. We tend to share firsthand whatever we're working on with the group and our fans can give us feedback and share their thoughts. Usually, feedback is positive, but there is some constructive negative feedback too. We want our fans to tell us what they think of our work. It's a good thermometer for us."
— Artist
Fan communities can provide valuable feedback to artists.
Safe spaces like fan communities can enable artists to tease new music or share WIP to drive engagement or gain early signals on how fans will respond to potential melodies, tunes, etc.
Additionally, enabling fans to provide input into artists’ creative direction and decision-making can help foster a stronger sense of investment and “ownership” among fans, which drives more meaningful, long-lasting engagement.
Fan Communities
Why are fan communities important for Gen Z listeners?
Diverse Digital Options
More access to an unprecedented, prolific, and diverse set of communities aligned by values, interests and culture
Fluid Connectivity
More platforms that allows them to seamlessly move from IRL to virtual connections
IRL Isolation
Increase restrictions for IRL, interactions during development years.
Fan Communities
Research Impact
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Research Impact 〰️
Spotify Launches Listening Parties
Listening Parties are the live audio experience where fans join their favorite artists and other top fans to celebrate an artist’s new music release. In the party fans can hear behind-the-scenes artist stories, chat in real time with other fans, and listen to the music they love with the artist who made it.
Direct, intimate communication
Direct, intimate communication
Artists are breaking down the fame barrier by sharing more and interacting directly with fans, fostering deeper connections.
Direct-to-fan communication and access via social media have changed the way artists connect with their fans and the level of agency artists have to define their identity, appearance, and voice. By sharing who they really are, they seem “just like us.”
For instance, by sharing her struggles with mental health over Instagram, one artist describes fostering a community of empathy and vulnerability. By regularly chatting with their fans over Community, another artist connects with fans through silly inside jokes and collaborations.
Gone are the days when artists felt inaccessible or un-relatable because of their fame.
Direct, intimate communication
Creators winning Gen Z are more accessible and relatable to their fans than creators of the past.
Creators winning Gen Z intentionally make themselves accessible. They appeal to Gen Z by breaking down the fame barrier through direct, regular conversation and interaction with fans. They put themselves on the same level as their fans through their style of two-way communication.
THEN
Some creators maintain a level of inaccessibility and refuse to engage with fans on social media.
NOW
Creators prioritize engaging with fans both online and IRL, such as meet & greets after shows.
Direct, intimate communication
Spotify doesn’t enable artist, fan communication
While artists and listeners are hesitant about Spotify becoming another social media platform, they’re eager for ways to communicate through Spotify - not only to notify listeners of news and events, but to hear their feedback on their music, and get to know them better.
“He should be able to DM his followers once per release.”
— Artist Manager
“I miss the messaging. It could be a beautiful way to interact with your fans.”
— Artist
“Maybe people could write comments as they’re listening to the music.”
— Artist
Direct, intimate communication
Research Impact
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Research Impact 〰️
Spotify Launches Listening Parties and includes direct fan to artist communication.
Fans can chat throughout the party in real time with the artist and one another. The chat is the heartbeat of the party, and is filled with jokes and kind words.
Authentic Marketing
It’s the organic side of it. I don’t think they want to be forced to see something a million times. I think that they want to very much be the ones to take control of their listening.”
— Director of Label Management
Authentic Marketing
Gen-Z is resistant to anything forced or disingenuous and aren’t afraid to call out inauthenticity.
Gen-Z grew up immersed in digital media and the targeted marketing and influencer campaigns that come with that. They have mastered the art of knowing when they are being targeted and have loud opinions about anything that feels forced.
The key to connecting with Gen-Z is to appear organic, natural and low key. If you try too hard or are disingenuous, you will be called out.
Rather than post a beautiful asset we make for them…they just take a shitty video of themselves with the song behind and half their face. And that's gonna do three times better. 'Cause that's what their fans wanna see. That feels cool to them. That just feels organic.” — Marketer
Digital marketers have responded by swapping flashy for low-key, and mega influencer for micro influencer.
It’s become the primary job of marketers to be immersed in the culture and fast moving trends of Gen-Z. It’s their job identify these trends and leverage them in a way that appears organic.
Driving word of mouth marketing and influencer marketing are the most natural ways to promote, but those are not easy tasks. Marketers like Ali Murphy undergo a rigorous vetting process when selecting influencers including reading comments across IG, YT, and TikTok. This is how they find niche, micro influencers who often have more impact in their authenticity than mega, million-follower influencers.
“Sometimes people have 1 million, 2 million, 3 million followers but the results, it's low…For us it's better to be with niche influencers because they do not have like thousand of million followers, but the people that follow them are very curated for the public we want to reach.”
— Marketing Manager
Authentic Marketing
Authentic Marketing
Influencer marketing is much more common among those who are changing their marketing strategies significantly to attract Gen Z.
Authentic Marketing
Research Opportunity
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Research Opportunity 〰️
The traditional release rollout is too prescriptive for Gen-Z. Instead, they respond to content that has organically gained popularity either through virality or a slow, natural, unpredictable process.
By understanding the ever evolving release rollout journey, it was identified that catalogue (music 18+ months old) can always be promoted. This insight offered an opportunity to build promotional tools for content beyond the new release
