Monetizing superfans is the talk of the music industry these days; now, a New York-based startup is launching a direct-to-consumer platform that it says will be “the first superfan app to count sales towards Billboard charting.”
After a year in Beta-testing, the EVEN platform has officially launched, the company announced on Tuesday (April 9).
On EVEN, fans buy music directly from artists under a tiered “pay what you want” model, where the tiers are set by the artist. Fans can get access to exclusive content such as first listens, meet-and-greets and listening parties, as well as access to exclusive merch and “bespoke visual content,” the company says.
To date, EVEN has onboarded some 10,000 artists, including established names such as French Montana, Omarion, Hit-Boy, Lauren Jauregui, and Jidenna, as well as “exciting upstarts” like LaRussell, Buddy, Destin Conrad, LaNelle Grant, and others.
The company was founded in 2022 by Mag Rodriguez, a music industry veteran who spent more than half a decade at startup accelerator gener8tor.
“I set out to build EVEN to fill a need for both artists and fans. Artists want to own the relationship with their fans and fans want direct proximity to their favorite artist,” Rodriguez said in a statement.
“EVEN is designed to grow the music industry’s pie. With EVEN, artists have the opportunity to sell their music first, directly to their fans before its wide release on streaming platforms. It’s not EVEN or streaming platforms, it’s EVEN and streaming platforms. With this launch, EVEN continues to fulfill this proposition. I couldn’t be prouder of our team and all of our artist, label and distributor partners.”
EVEN features a mobile app “where fans can directly engage with their favorite artists, chat with fellow music lovers, and enjoy offline access to a vast library of purchased music,” as well as Fan Connect, an engagement tool that gives artists “direct access to their audience” and the ability to announce new releases, special edition merch, exclusive content and more.
The company says sales on EVEN will count towards Billboard charts, with the company directly reporting sales to Luminate, the company that collects the data for Billboard charts.
EVEN plans to be a global platform, and says it’s onboarding fans across 100 countries, supports payments in 135 currencies and supports 22 global payment methods, including CashApp, Klarna, WeChat, and AliPay.
“I set out to build EVEN to fill a need for both artists and fans. Artists want to own the relationship with their fans and fans want direct proximity to their favorite artist.”
Mag Rodriguez, EVEN
The platform is launching into an increasingly crowded field of startup direct-to-fan music platforms.
Fan platform Fave, whose early investors include Warner Music and Sony Music, announced last fall that it had raised $2 million in a funding round that it expected would reach $6 million over time.
Not long thereafter, it announced the launch of an AI-powered tool that enables artists to identify and reach their biggest fans.
Earlier this year, musician and songwriter James Blake became the first artist to sign up to Vault.fm, a platform where “artists can share their unreleased tracks directly from their vault to their fans and tap into a new recurring revenue stream.”
Also earlier this year, London-based web3 startup TRAX raised $2.9 million in a decentralized funding round conducted on the Internet Computer ($ICP) blockchain. The platform acts as a content aggregator and social marketplace, catering specifically to artists and their superfans.
Meanwhile, a new app for unsigned artists called Insidr Music is set to launch this year, promising that its direct-to-fan subscription model could see artists earn “4,000% more than other music streaming platforms.”
And, of course, it’s not just startups aiming to cash in on superfans; major music companies are jumping in themselves, in a variety of ways. For instance, Spotify appears to be developing “superfan clubs” to be integrated into its streaming platform.
Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music rightsholder, is making bets on a variety of superfan-related innovations, including an investment into Weverse, the superfan platform developed by K-pop giant HYBE; and taking a stake in youth-oriented media platform Complex (alongside investors such as Goldman Sachs, Main Street Advisors and Jimmy Iovine).
Meanwhile, Warner Music Group is going the in-house route and building its own “superfan app.”
“I’ve assembled a team of incredible technology talent from Google and Stripe and Instacart and lots of other great technology companies who are working on a superfan app, where artists can connect directly with their superfans,” CEO Robert Kyncl said in February.Music Business Worldwide
