Paris • New York
From Followers to Reachable Fans
2022 – Present
How I helped the music industry take back its fans
For years, the music industry built its audience on platforms it didn’t own. Artists gathered millions of followers on Instagram, but when an album dropped or a tour went on sale, they had no way to reach those fans directly. The algorithm decided who would see the news. Most labels couldn’t even tell you who their followers were.
I’ve spent the last few years changing that.
The challenge
When I started working with the music industry, I quickly understood the problem wasn’t a lack of audience. It was a lack of relationship.
Labels sell music, not products. Their D2C teams are small, often a handful of people for an entire roster. Social media teams and CRM teams rarely work together: one owns Instagram, the other owns the email database, and the fan sits somewhere in between. And every release has a few days to make noise before attention moves on.
So the question I kept asking was simple: what if every like, comment and story reply could become a real, direct connection with a fan?
The approach
My answer was to turn Instagram itself into the place where fans join the artist’s world.
1. Recruit. A fan comments on a post, replies to a story or clicks an ad, and a conversation starts in their DMs, on the app they already use every day.
2. Qualify. In a few messages, we learn what they love, collect their email with consent, and understand who they are.
3. Activate. The label can now reach those fans one-to-one for a release, a vinyl drop, a tour or a contest, without sending them through a website they’ll leave in seconds.
The journey
It started in the US with Thirty Seconds to Mars. We built a DM fan club that lets the band reach hundreds of thousands of fans with a single message. It didn’t just drive engagement; it sold merch, tickets and VIP packages, and even mobilized fans to vote at the VMAs.
Then came France. I started with one label, Polydor, and proved the model there. It spread across Universal Music France, then to Universal’s fan media brands, and finally to the group level, with Universal Music Germany. Each step came from a team recommending the work to the next, not from me pitching harder.
Sony Music and Believe followed, then independent labels, in Europe, the US and Latin America.
The hardest part was never the technology. It was getting siloed teams to work toward the same goal. I spent as much time training label teams and building use cases as I did running campaigns. Once a social team and a CRM team saw the same fans turning into buyers, the conversation changed.
What it built
3 majors
6.7%
3 regions
What I learned
Music taught me that an audience you don’t own isn’t really an audience. A million followers means nothing if you can’t talk to them. Ten thousand fans you know by name, and can reach in one message, can launch an album.
Today, I apply the same thinking to every brand I work with, whether it’s fashion, sports or retail: stop renting attention, and start building relationships.
“Erwan’s forward-thinking strategies are paving the way for the future of artist-fan relationships.”
— Whitney Moser, Head of E-Commerce, Thirty Seconds to Mars