The Streams Are Up, But The Fans Aren’t There. What Music Marketing Is Getting Wrong Right Now

Fans of the band Years and Years celebrating the live performance at the Albert Hall music venue in Manchester, England, on Sunday 18th October 2015. (Photo by Jonathan Nicholson/NurPhoto) (Photo by NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

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The music industry has never had more tools to reach audiences. Algorithmic targeting, real-time analytics, trending audio campaigns, creator partnerships — the infrastructure is more sophisticated than it has ever been. Yet something is still off. Campaigns launch, get their moment, and fade without leaving a mark. Artists rack up streams without building fans. Content goes viral without creating connection.

I asked music marketing executives the same question: what is music marketing missing? The answers differed in approach but pointed in the same direction.

Emotion

Nina Schollnick, Digital Marketing at Red Light Management, frames it directly: “A TikTok trend or covering a song aren’t strategies; people are tired of that same recycled playbook, they want something that actually brings them closer to the music. If your content is tired, the fans will feel it. The most effective campaigns right now are the ones that make the audience feel something before they even press play.”

The evidence is in what has actually broken through. Alex Warren’s 2025 campaign — shaky iPhone footage, raw vocal takes, unedited bedroom-lit sessions — didn’t look like marketing at all. That was the point. It felt like watching someone process something in real time, and fans couldn’t look away. No polish, no playbook. Just emotion, delivered directly. Compare that to the wave of copycat “trending audio” posts flooding artist feeds — stripped of personality, stripped of story, built entirely around chasing an algorithm that has already moved on. Audiences feel the difference, and they always will.

Boldness

Cameron Rogers, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing & Strategy at Roc Nation, sees a structural problem behind the creative one: “Most campaigns follow trends instead of defining them. This is in part due to the fact that we’ve built great tools to track data, but they’ve also made us more risk-averse. What’s needed now is a strong creative point of view that is executed consistently to create the next status quo and push culture forward.”

Data tools weren’t built to produce timidity, but in practice, they’ve given risk-aversion a spreadsheet to hide behind. Brat proved what happens when a team ignores all of it. Charli XCX’s campaign wasn’t a traditional album rollout but one built around recognition, prestige, and respect, and it ended with her hosting Saturday Night Live, shutting down Times Square with a pop-up concert, and earning a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year. By bucking trends rather than chasing them, she set her own and became a market leader. The lime-green cover was initially criticized. There was no obvious radio single. Every conventional data signal suggested caution. The culture responded anyway.

Chris Miglioranzi, Founder & CEO of Respective Collective, names the same gap at the major-label level: “Large-scale music marketing is missing guts. A lot of the standout campaigns from the advertising world, as well as smaller artists, are daring and brave, but large artists, labels, and festivals are partial to playing it safe. Fans are hungry for something disruptive and creative.”

Real-World Fan Participation

Julie Nguyen, Co-Head of Marketing & SVP at JET Management, points to something the digital-first era cannot replicate on its own: “Music marketing has become overly digital. What’s missing is real-world fan participation — moments that require people to show up, take part, and unlock something together. That creates more of a lasting impact.”

The recent record-setting tours demonstrate exactly this. For the Cowboy Carter Tour, Marriott Bonvoy hosted themed dance parties and photo stations at nearby properties on concert days, extending the campaign beyond arenas and giving traveling fans a festive gathering place. Cities lit their skylines with cowboy hat projections. The music became a reason to show up in person, and showing up became part of the marketing itself. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour built something similar through fan ritual: friendship bracelet exchanges, coordinated outfit recreations, collective experiences that couldn’t be replicated on a phone screen alone. The distinction between being invited to participate versus invited to witness is exactly what separates campaigns that build lasting fandoms from ones that simply generate impressions.

Artist Perspective at the Foundation

Via Perkins, Music Brand Marketer, raises a point the industry rarely addresses openly: “There are a surprising number of music startup founders that don’t have a background in music. Those founders are at a huge disadvantage if they don’t add a musician to their team or consult with one on a regular basis. The music industry is not only complex, it’s changing all the time — and artists are the ones in the center of it all, experiencing and reacting to those changes in real time. Don’t put thousands of dollars and countless hours into a business idea that doesn’t actually work for your target audience. Seek out the critical feedback you need to be successful right at the start.”

The observation extends beyond startups. Any campaign built in a boardroom without an artist’s voice in the room carries the same risk. The most disconnected rollouts of recent years share a common thread: they read like they were designed by people who consume music as a category, not a culture. Artists aren’t just the product in music marketing, they’re the primary source of intelligence about what their audience actually wants.

Patience

Nance Stolze, Senior Project Manager at ONErpm, identifies a pressure quietly reshaping how the entire industry operates: “Music marketing is losing the patience that is needed to build real fans and a lasting career. Many artists are hoping to blast off from one song or social post, which puts more pressure on themselves and creates more disappointment if this huge moment doesn’t occur. Focusing on reaching new people while building a stronger connection with existing will be more fulfilling in the long run.”

Every campaign held up as a recent gold standard — Brat, the Eras Tour, Cowboy Carter — was the product of years of foundation-laying, not a single explosive moment. Charli XCX’s mainstream breakthrough came after eight years of building with her fanbase and the wider hyperpop scene. Consistent creative identity, consistent fan investment, consistent point of view, the moment arrived, and the audience was already there to receive it. Virality is a byproduct of that kind of groundwork, not a substitute for it.

The thread connecting all five perspectives is the same: music marketing has optimized for reach at the expense of resonance. The tools got better; the connection got thinner. Emotion, boldness, real-world presence, artist perspective, patience, none of these register cleanly on a dashboard. That’s precisely why they keep getting skipped.

The campaigns that actually move culture aren’t built from what the data says is safe. They’re built from a clear point of view, executed with conviction, and designed to create a feeling audiences weren’t expecting. That has always been the job. The industry just needs to get back to treating it that way.