With the rise of Spotify and online streaming, the music industry has been forced to completely evolve in recent years. As fans consume music differently, artists have had to come along for the ride. And this isn’t a one-time shift from analogue to digital. As is the nature of technology, new platforms and ways of listening are popping up consistently. Sometimes these appear with a boom and fade pretty quickly, and sometimes they make a lasting impact, which seems to be the case with the likes of TikTok.
This also isn’t a challenge unique to musicians alone. It expands to publishers, filmmakers, content creators, the list goes on. As an artist, it’s no mean feat to keep your finger on the pulse of these trends. It can leave creators feeling disconnected from their audience and at a loss on how to effectively rebuild relationships with fans. This is a problem Push Entertainment is trying to solve.
“Social media acts as a disintermediator between the creator and the fan”
Push Entertainment is a fan engagement company that provides a range of strategy and development tools for the entertainment and creative industries. Its primary objective is to utilise tech to its best ability to create better connections with fans. We caught up with the founder, Simon Scott, to find out more.
“The biggest challenge we’re currently facing is adjusting to the changing impact of social channels. They act as a disintermediator between the creator and the fan and although they help reach, they do tend to set controls over the relationship that needs navigating,” explains Simon.
After 20 years in the industry, the team has extensive experience. In that time, we’ve seen the rise of social media and the subsequent impact on creative industries. Throughout this journey, Push Entertainment has been perfecting the ways in which artists can engage with their fans. Now the technology they design, build and run touches millions of fans every day.
Facing challenges and taking opportunities in a creator economy
Ensuring its clients are equipped with the right strategy to monopolise the current ‘creator economy’ is central to Push Entertainment’s services. To do this, the team delivers a combination of consulting, delivery and support to provide the fundamental building blocks of fan engagement strategy. This is divided into:
- E-commerce Architecture: Integration of flexible shopping carts into your existing systems.
- Content Management Architecture: Integration of your Enterprise content and assets in a common scalable consumer facing content management system.
- Platform Migration: Achieve business continuity whilst migrating to new technology stacks.
Simon tells us a prominent focus at the moment is on, “using blockchain technologies to build entertainment formats that have an evolving experience. We believe the fans will find their route back to ownership by purchasing a combination of content and access that evolve over time.”
On recent trends, he comments, “It has been a time of massive transition. Ownership of music to renting music; album to track; long-term development of acts to a 14-second TikTok earworm. These all mean technology solutions need to be more responsive to viral trends yet deal with high traffic volumes at short notice.”
And Push Entertainment has seen impressive success in this department. Simon says that a defining moment for the team was, “when one of our technologies was used on over 50% of the USA and UK Top Ten album charts. That’s pretty hard to top.”
If you work in the Music, Publishing, Film, TV, Gaming, Influencer and Retail Brand industries and want to know how you can boost your fan engagement through tech, reach out to Push Entertainment to see if they can help you.
