214 – Engage Your Fans – with Sarah Beth Perry of With the Band

Do you wish you could do a better job of engaging your fans? Have you ever thought about starting a fan club? That’s what we’re going to be looking at in this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, featuring Sarah Beth Perry of With the Band. Podcast Highlights: 00:27 – Our special guest, Sarah Beth Perry of With the Band 02:11 – How and why was With the Band created? 05:41 – What is Fan Crews? 11:20 – Fan clubs – an opportunity many artists are missing 13:35 – What else is happening with With the Band? 15:48 – What was the last YouTube video Sarah watched? 16:22 – What is Sarah’s daily routine like? 18:02 – What’s the greatest challenge Sarah has overcome? 21:54 – What is Sarah’s greatest victory? 23:59 – How can listeners collaborate with high profile artists or clients? 26:01 – What pain points does Sarah have as a music entrepreneur? 27:56 – Sarah’s recommended books 33:10 – Closing thoughts Transcription: David Andrew Wiebe: Today, I'm passing the mic with founder and CEO of With the Band, Sarah Beth Perry. How are you today, Sarah? Sarah Beth Perry: Doing great. How are you doing? David Andrew Wiebe: I'm doing well. Thank you for asking. This has become an obligatory question as of late, but how have you been holding up during the pandemic? Sarah Beth Perry: You know, it has been a whirlwind to say the least. I feel like everyone is saying the past six months, and now it's just been more than six months. But you know, I feel like we've hit some of our like high-highs but also those low-lows. And, you know, it's just trying to remind yourself that there is no limit to how much you can do in a day working from home and really trying to get somewhat of a work life balance, but overall, you know, really can't complain for how we're doing in the pandemic. David Andrew Wiebe: That's good. Yeah. It really is altogether too easy to push the limits, which is exactly what I ended up doing over the course of the summer, which is why I needed a break. But it's good to find a sense of balance or whatever that looks like during these times because it's easy to overwork for sure when you don't have anywhere to go or anything to do necessarily. Sarah Beth Perry: Oh, yeah. I know I definitely struggled with that too. I've been trying to limit myself on certain times I'm not allowed to be on the computer. Because if you don't, you just are in front of a screen the entire time you're up. David Andrew Wiebe: Yeah, which I'm starting to suspect isn't great for you. I've kind of gotten used to it. Other people say I'm exhausted staring at the screen that long. How do you do it? And I'm like, I don't know. I just gotten used to it. But I think it's still good to have limits. Yeah. So, your website states that there's an opportunity for artists to better engage their fan base. You won't hear any disagreements from me, but what opportunity did you see and how did that lead you to creating With the Band? Sarah Beth Perry: Yeah. So, growing up I actually grew up in Nashville. So, like, I always knew I wanted to work within the music industry. I didn't exactly know what. And then as I got older, I have a younger sister. She and I became the typical fan girls of, you know, some of the classic boy bands. And that was really when I first got a taste of what fan engagement should be, but also what I felt like was lacking from a fan's perspective. And then, I didn't really think too much about it until I went and studied at Belmont University and was in a music business class. You really don't realize until you really try to dive deep in the industry, how many different types of jobs there are. And so, it really wasn't until that point that I realized, like, wait, someone is doing fan engagement. Like, that is someone's job out there. That's really when I realized that that's what I wanted to do. And then, I went searching for this company that I thought had to be out there, had to exist, to help artists better engage with their fans, and was super surprised to find nothing that I thought really solved that problem in the way it should be solved. I literally just research for a year before I started the company really trying to figure out what is out there and really where that big gap was in the market. David Andrew Wiebe: Yeah. I think a fan's perspective is certainly valuable. I think there are people in this space who are now experts who basically started out promoting other bands or building fan clubs or things like that for their favorite artists. So, to me, it makes sense having that perspective going into business like yours. It just makes a lot of sense. Sarah Beth Perry: Yeah. And it's just so valuable too because even everyone else on our team has been a big music fan before. And so, it's just nice when you are like, either DMing these fans on Instagram, or just really even writing a blog post, interacting with fans in any way. It's so good to know like what their mindset is and really try to kind of get to their level on that. Like, almost a friendship type BFF thing and come from that point of view from a company. So, it's been really a great background experience to have from all of our team members. David Andrew Wiebe: Yeah. And I think many of us do start that way. I certainly started as a fan of music before I got into playing music or talking about digital marketing within the music business or anything in that capacity. Looking back, I can see that a big part of it is just interpreting or understanding culture through music. I grew up in Japan. So, I knew that side of things. When I returned to Canada, I had no idea who any of these artists were. I thought I might have a better handle on that but I didn't. So, it was from step one. And at the time, it was Chumbawamba and Will Smith, and [unclear 05:23] and stuff like that. So, that was kind of my entry point back into the North American music scape. Eventually, I went a little more obscure as I tend to do, but it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. Sarah Beth Perry: Yeah, that's awesome. David Andrew Wiebe: Yeah. I hear you're also working on fan cruise, modern fan club concept. What does that look like and how does it work? Sarah Beth Perry: Yeah. So, what we, as a company, had done before COVID is we created these, basically fan engagement campaign. We call them fan activations. We are creating these large fan projects and fan meetups. Thus far, we had only done different shows in Nashville but we are doing these arenas as shows. We did one at the Jonas Brothers concert, and then one for Kacey Musgraves. It was her first headlining show at the arena in Nashville. We were scheduled to do different campaigns like that for different artists through the spring and summer. And then, of course, COVID hit. We were completely live events at that standpoint so we kind of had to step back and really analyze, okay, how long do we think this is going to last? Do we kind of come up with a Plan B on what we can do until we can get back to the shows? And so, I had actually had some different managers. And so, heads of ad digital of labels reaching out to me just saying like, “Hey, Sarah. We know you've done this in the past. What can we do with our artists now besides Instagram Live Stream?” I was honestly having a hard time trying to come up with ideas for them because when I was really trying to just research, I really realised how few tools there were out there for artists in this time to really engage with their fans besides Instagram Live Stream, or all the, you know, the now like 10,000 other live streaming platforms. That's really where this kind of idea sparked is, even, you know, me thinking about starting With the Band all the way like three years ago, I always wanted to kind of create a modern-day version of a fan club because when I was younger, I was in, I feel like kind of the last few fan clubs that were super popular. Today, there still are some fan clubs but it's very much like older rock bands or there's some male country artists. And that's really it. I just felt like for such a modern time, we needed an update on this technology that has not been updated in like 20 years. And so, we really sat down and started researching what would a modern-day fan club look like. We really realized that when talking with artists teams that there was this association of fan club with like pre-sale tickets, because that was, you know, like the older traditional model paid 40 bucks a year and the fan club can get pre-sale tickets. We really realized in order to modernize that we had to change the name. We decided to change it to fan crew because we felt that it really encompassed the new modern-day era of a fandom of like, you think of the BTS fans. It's just like this rabid pack of fans. We thought that fan crew really embodied that. So, that's what we are calling the new platform. What it does is it enables artists to create their own fan crew where they can create different membership tiers and price levels for their fans. They actually get complete customization over it. So, they can change everything from how many tiers they are offering, what price they are offering to, what are the actual benefits they're offering their fans. So, they can do things like private live streams. They can do virtual meet and greets. They can do early access to new music. They can really pick and choose what they want to give to their fans. And then, we sit down with them and really say, “Okay. Well, how much value do you think fans see this for?” Whether that's like $499 or $999 a month. We made it into a monthly subscription model because if you look at all the other things, especially like Gen Z and Millennials are purchasing, its very subscription model based. We felt like by doing a monthly subscription model,