For years, marketers have nagged artists to post more on TikTok. Now, they’re turning to another group to do it instead: fans.
Over the past few years, major artists have transformed small, in-person events into billions of TikTok views by making experiences that organically encourage fans in attendance to get out their phones, hit record and post. Alex Warren did it with his London tube station pop-up in March; Charli xcx did it with her Brat wall and Boiler Room underplays last summer; Bon Iver did it with a basketball tournament in April; and the All-American Rejects did it with their mega-viral house party tour this spring, which has helped to propel their comeback. “This is the part of the tour that no one’s talking about,” says Jenni Call, the digital marketing guru working with the pop-punk band. “And they should. The UGC [user-generated content] put them back on the map.”
“This trend has been bubbling up for the best part of a year and a half now,” says Jamie Skinner, a freelance digital marketer whose worked for artists like girl in red. “But in the last eight to 12 months, it’s really started to rally quite considerably.” Experts attribute the trend to the post-pandemic itch to get back outside, the shift in social media platforms toward “For You” pages (helping average users go viral much more easily) — and the lauded marketing campaign for Charli xcx’s Brat.
In July 2024, Charli’s digital marketer, Terry O’Connor, told Billboard that “a big focus of this campaign has been on making and creating real life, in-person moments around this album… We are in a time when most labels are just focused on pushing their artists to create digital content for TikTok, Reels, Shorts, etc.” But, O’Connor added, “what people are forgetting is that what Gen Z — and our society in general — actually want is to experience things in real life.”
Steven Pardo, senior director of digital marketing at Secretly Group, says that once his roster — which includes Mitski, Bon Iver and Phoebe Bridgers — resumed touring after COVID-19 lockdowns lifted, the UGC from random showgoers sometimes fared even better than the UGC posted by paid influencers — which was the hottest digital marketing method at the time. “We quickly started to realize that touring was actually a very potent way to market music online,” Pardo says. “In a world where there’s an incessant need for content, this is a way to do it without having to make an artist do anything differently than just being an artist.”
Later, Pardo and his team leaned into that discovery more, staging quirkier and more artist-specific activities that might travel to wider audiences on social media. Faye Webster, for example, hosted a yo-yo invitational last year, and fan-made videos from it garnered hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok. That Bon Iver basketball tournament in Los Angeles also reached fans across the world — one unpaid fan’s video of the tournament, for example, yielded over 830,000 views and nearly 100,000 likes on TikTok alone.
Meanwhile, when Charli xcx and Sabrina Carpenter went on tour, their sets featured segments that were easily capturable and created anticipation for their extremely online crowds, whether or not it was intentionally optimized for UGC. Charli xcx’s “Apple” dance, which pans the arena’s camera to a surprise celebrity in the crowd once a night, has reached millions of viewers. So has Carpenter’s outros for her song “Nonsense” and the suggestive positions she does during the song “Juno,” both of which kept fans on their toes, cameras at the ready, night after night.
“I think it works because of the little sense of FOMO [fear of missing out] you get when you watch these videos,” says Pardo. “When you watch someone get to have a unique experience in real life, it plays into what most of us are seeking now, which is to not be on our phone and to find other people who are like minded. When you give people online a window into a real experience, they watch.”
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This trend toward taking artist marketing back outside is true even beyond music. In the dating world, Gen Zers are expressing fatigue with algorithmic dating apps, instead preferring to meet singles at more organic gatherings like run clubs. Folks are ditching their at-home Pelotons for studio Pilates classes, and “community” seems to be the latest buzz word on the tip of every tech founder’s tongue.
But TikTok-optimized marketing moments are just the latest iteration in a long history of artists and brands trying to host experiences that translate to social media. In the mid-to-late 2010s, for example, Instagram was the it-platform for savvy marketers. This prompted Billie Eilish’s team to host an activation with Spotify for her first album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? that was designed for photos. Fans who attended the event were guided through a series of aesthetically pleasing rooms, themed after each song on the album — and when those fans posted their photos on IG, the event’s impact spread to Billie fans everywhere. Similarly, Netflix hosted an experience where fans could capture photos of themselves in small, recreated sets for hit shows like Stranger Things. Meanwhile, experiential companies like the Ice Cream Museum popped up around the world as essentially adult Instagram playgrounds, featuring themed rooms perfect for content taking like its famous pit of fake sprinkles.
The difference between then and now is the shift towards audiovisual content and For You pages. TikTok shook up the social media landscape around the time of the pandemic, moving it from a model that served content based on who one is following to one that served content based on one’s interests. By focusing on interest-based content, TikTok — and all of the apps that followed their approach — made virality for newcomers much easier, empowering fans, regardless of their follower count, to post and to find connection with likeminded people.
Call says that new tools for marketers like her are also enabling this trend. As word spread about the Rejects’ house party tour, she began working with the popular startup Cobrand to send out text blasts direct to fans, catalog every piece of UGC made, track pre-saves on Spotify, and more — all in one dashboard. While bits and pieces of this service have been available for years, Call says “it’s never been more efficient” to connect with fans than it is now. In the end, many viral moments later, she claims the band’s agents did an analysis of the house parties and found “the number of impressions and people reached from it was the equivalent of a $4.2 million campaign,” adding, “There’s a way to be scrappy and to find your fans. I think this is the perfect case study — the fans did so much of the work for us.”
But experts say this focus on IRL-to-UGC moments does not take away from the popularity of other digital marketing trends, like running fake fan pages for the artist or doing paid creator campaigns. As Skinner says: “Arguably, gathering this UGC is actually essential for running fan pages right now.”
Fan pages, another relatively new digital marketing must-have, involves the artist’s team setting up multiple pages on TikTok, posing as regular fans, in another attempt to reach real fans in the increasingly saturated social media landscape. To keep up with the relentless posting schedule of about 1-5 times a day on each of these accounts, Skinner says reposting fan-made videos from live events is the perfect solution.
“You’re really scaling how far each piece of content can go,” Skinner says. “Then on top of that, if we are doing a micro-influencer campaign [hiring influencers with a smaller followings of 5,000 to around 50,000] too, we can just ask them to go to these events to capture moments. Many of them are happy to just go down to a show, capture a specific moment that we’ve briefed them on, get them to post and then send us the high-res files. It’s great.”
For Dylan Brewer, former vp of marketing at Epic Records and founder of new creative and experiential music marketing firm Fraudulent, this trend in marketing has become a major business. “I think experiential and IRL marketing is step one. It’s the core,” he says. “But now the idea of ‘set before stage’ is more important than ever. Now I tell people, ‘let’s think about how this thing will get shot. Let’s prioritize that.’”
Like other forms of marketing, it’s hard to quantify the success of these events. Are engaged fans enough, or should these events produce more merch sales or a surge in streaming activity? “I think the reason these events are so great for fans and artists is because they typically aren’t monetized or set up to extract value from fans,” Pardo says. “It’s really refreshing for fans in a time when every conversation turns into, ‘How do we monetize superfans?’ It’s about creating connection and excitement and letting that be the main currency.”
This story is part of Billboard’s music technology newsletter ‘Machine Learnings.’ Sign up for ‘Machine Learnings’ and other Billboard newsletters for free here.
