The 10 categories of the music fan spectrum: Where do you fit in?

Musicians know that all fans are not the same. Meanwhile, all of us have different levels of relationships depending on the artist. Here's a new way of measuring all that.

No two music fans are alike. We casually like some artists with our entire relationship beginning and ending with humming the melody to one of their records.

But then there are those with whom we are obsessed. We cannot get enough of them. In between those extremes are various levels of engagement that musicians, managers, and labels should be monitoring and nurturing.

With Web 3.0 initiatives quickly taking hold, the music industry is looking for new ways to understand the next generation of fans. Technology is shifting the very nature of fandom in ways that will be transformative over the coming years.

Spring, a company that partners with artists when it comes to e-commerce, commissioned a study of 8,000 music fans in hopes of charting out the future emotional and eventually financial relationships between fans and artists.

The result is a psychographic breakdown that puts fans into 10 different buckets, each featuring different levels of investment when it comes to emotion, spending, energy, time, and evangelism.

The first three fan types can be loosing grouped as being “Engaged.” The Browser is the most casual music listener (37 per cent of those in the survey), someone who stumbles across content, enjoys it on a superficial level, and then is either distracted or gets bored and moves on.

Type two is the Observer, someone who lurks around the music but doesn’t really commit too deeply.

The final “Engaged” type of fan is Curious. They’re intrigued by what they hear and are open to perhaps being encouraged to get more involved with the community of like-minded people who follow a particular band.