Building fandom is about the journey, not the destination

“Superfans” remain the headline topic for the entertainment industries, in music and beyond. They are the biggest cheerleaders amongst their peers, the most engaged on social media and streaming, and the highest spenders across the board.

There is a certain irony, then, that the other headline topic is AI; a technology that promotes passive engagement and does everything for you with utmost ease. AI and its adoption are emblematic of the flip side of this coin, but it is not alone. Much of innovation in entertainment over the last two decades has optimised ease, efficiency, and economy across the board – from making entertainment to accessing it.

Ease may convert more audience members initially, but it does not build deep ties that last long or drive bigger purchase decisions. It may bring in customers, but does it build fans?

The digital scarcity conundrum

Scarcity drives value. Yet in digital entertainment, scarcity must, to some extent, be manufactured. Gatekeeping that focuses on spend – like paying to access online spaces, or NFTs – can come across as exclusionary and unnecessary. Creating natural behavioural friction to entry – that invites the most interested audiences to explore, invest their time, effort, and energy, while turning them into fans along the way – is a critical, albeit tricky, balance to strike.

Ironically, the less innovated a space is, the more organically it achieves this. Underground raves that live in unconventional venues and do not leave much online footprint drive loyalty and culture precisely because they are not obvious or easy to find. EDM DJs note how difficult it is to find elusive deep cuts, yet it is the time spent chasing them, and the connections made in pursuit, which build the skillsets and the experience they enjoy and take pride in. Metal, which has stubbornly opposed mainstream adoption or innovation for decades, is still thriving in its lane with a core culture of dedicated fans who collect gig patches as badges of honour. This is not to say that mainstream propositions cannot create fandom; just that it needs to build in layers of engagement.

Enter the ‘easter egg’

Taylor Swift’s music sends her most ardent listeners on investigative quests: the latest love interest, connections between albums, teasers of what she might do next. Everyone loves a low-stakes way of living out their own true crime podcast, with all the intrigue and none of the crime.

Games franchises are well placed to create tiers of fan engagement. Game developers can design different worlds and levels that encourage, but do not demand progress. In the most straightforward sense, this looks like leaderboard rankings on Call of Duty or Apex Legends. In more creative, less competitive ways, this looks like hidden cutscenes and different storylines in Red Dead Redemption. Hiding these little perks encourages replay and results in a vibrant fan community on high alert for hints of a new easter egg to hunt for.

Even TV shows like Game of Thrones were about so much more than the show itself. Hinted prophecies were drip-fed throughout books with years between releases, allowing (probably unhealthy) degrees of intrigue and theorising to build in subreddits and group chats. The franchise’s hype largely cooled when the mystery died.

It is not all about the money

Consumers like ease and convenience. This ease and convenience does, however, come at the cost of value – and not just the financial kind. Binge viewing seemed like a great practice when Netflix began releasing all episodes of a series in one go. It meant audiences were sitting down for five plus hours to watch a show. Yet over time, it became clear that those shows did not maintain engagement, and growing production demands were not being matched by subscriber growth. Audiences liked the convenience, but rarely did it go any deeper than that.

It is the chase, the mystery, the time spent in anticipatory speculation, desperately craving the next episode or song or clue, that makes us really care. Over time, a fixation on consumption ease and volume has begun reducing passionate ‘artists’ to ‘creators’ slaving away in front of ring lights, and enthusiastic ‘audiences’ to ‘consumers’ doomscrolling whatever their algorithms deign. Fans are fans because art makes them feel something, while content for the sake of content numbs audiences en masse. Refocusing on fandom is a natural pendulum swing back one way, but the push for AI-augmented mass content production is all the way on the other.

Both strategies are valid, but they are not interchangeable. A mass approach to content and passive consumption using ease as the appeal can yield returns at scale, but real fandom – and with it, higher prices or deeper engagement – will remain largely out of reach. Fans and superfans will spend more time, money, and energy on the things they are passionate about, but they need to be given a reason to care in the first place. That emotional affinity does not thrive on ease and convenience, but rather ways for them to explore and engage on their own terms, for its own sake. When it comes it building fandom, it is all about the journey.