Simon Hennes

Takeaways

1 in 5 fans is a superfan. Most organizers can't tell which.

superfan·noun the fan who buys the moment a tour drops, follows it across cities, and plans the year around who is touring. One in five music fans is now a superfan. They show up more often, they spend more, and they account for a disproportionate share of what live takes in. They are the most valuable audience in the business, andmost organizers cannot identify a single one of them. I have spent my last two editions on why being there keeps gaining value, and how that scarcity became a business strategy. Superfans are the proof. They are also the clearest sign of something the industry has accepted for too long: it sells to people it never gets to know. An organizer can sell out an arena and have no idea which buyers came for the first time and which have been to every tour for a decade. The person paying for the whole thing stays invisible in their own system. For years, growth meant buying reach. A few thousand on social, a retargeting pixel, a lookalike audience, and a fresh crowd showed up. That still works. It just works worse than it did, and it costs more to pull off. Acquiring a new customer through ads on Google or social media now runs40-60%higher than in 2023, and none of the ways to buy attention come cheap. Paid social keeps climbing while privacy rules shrink what you can target. A national TV spot or a run of billboards still costs a fortune and tells you almost nothing about who actually responded. The casual fan is harder to win on top of that. As being there gained value, it also got more deliberate, and people are pickier about which nights are worth it. The once-a-year attendee is no longer the easy yes they used to be. The supply of strangers has not disappeared, it has just become a worse deal, and that is exactly what makes the audience you already have worth more. The fan leaves a trail Now turn it around, because this is where it gets good for anyone running events. The audience that already pays you is the cheapest and most profitable one you will ever reach. And superfans are not hard to spot, if you actually look. They stream the catalog on repeat, they reshare every announcement, they show up to the shows. The strongest signal of all is a ticket, because it is paid and confirmed: a name, an email, real money, and the one artist or team they will rearrange their year for.Bring those signals together, the streams, the social activity, the purchases, and you can see exactly who your most valuable fans are. Here is what it lets you do once you put it to work. Spot your superfans and give them first access, so the biggest shows sell out before a dollar goes to ads. Reach last year's buyers the day a tour is announced, while intent is high and the reach costs nothing. Win back the ones who drifted. Turn a single-night buyer into someone who comes three times a year.Every event grows an audience you own instead of one you rent, so each show makes the next one cheaper to fill. That is real money left on the table. In 2024, Goldman Sachs claude puts the unclaimed value in superfans alone ataround four and a half billion dollars a year. Pulling those signals together and acting on them is hard, unglamorous work, and it is the problem we have been chipping away at with vivenu Engage. And none of this is a one-off campaign. A superfan you can actually recognize is an asset that compounds. Every show teaches you more about them, every signal sharpens the next message, and the relationship is worth more the longer you hold it. It turns a live business from something you rebuild from scratch every on-sale into something that grows on its own. So the bottom line is simple. The most valuable fans in live are already here, leaving a trail across everything they touch.Following it costs far less than chasing strangers, and pays back far more. Sources: superfan share of listeners and their live attendance and spend, Luminate, 2025. Customer acquisition cost up 40 to 60% from 2023 to 2025 and rising ad auction prices, CAC benchmarks, 2026. ~$4.5bn unclaimed superfan revenue a year, Goldman Sachs, Music in the Air.

Takeaways

Why "you had to be there" became a business strategy.

Two weeks ago, a promoter planning an international residency told me: "Every person who leaves should feel like they witnessed something that will never happen again." I've been thinking about that ever since. Not because of the ambition. Because I keep hearing versions of the same sentence from promoters, venue operators, festival organizers, across completely different markets. And none of them are just talking about putting on a great show. They are talking about designing rooms where every person in the audience earned their way in. Fewer seats. Higher commitment. The show becomes the filter. For years, "you had to be there" was how fans described an experience they couldn't explain. Woodstock. Live Aid. That night your club got promoted and the whole city lost its mind. Today it is how operators design one. A Coldplay stadium show that turns 60,000 wristbands into something no screen can capture. The Eras Tour making every city feel like the only city that mattered. Not louder marketing. Not bigger venues. A fundamental rewiring of what makes live valuable. In my last Edition, I wrote about fandom becoming the core asset of live entertainment. The follow-up question I ask myself: if fandom is the asset, what is scarcity? The industry always treated scarcity as a byproduct. One night, one room, one moment. Now scarcity is the product.Engineered, protected, priced. And once you see it that way, the pattern is everywhere. A residency that only exists in one city. A phone-free room where the show lives only in memory. Dave Chappelle refusing to go on stage without every phone sealed in a Yondr pouch. Bob Dylan. Madonna. The show becomes something you can only describe, never replay. A hospitality tier designed so the fan next to you feels like they're at a different event entirely. A ticket that carries your name, your tier, your relationship with the organizer. None of these were coordinated. They emerged independently, across sports, music, festivals, comedy. Different problems, same instinct: make the room unrepeatable on purpose. And when the room is unrepeatable, willingness to pay follows. Fans are no longer comparing ticket prices to other shows. They are comparing to the cost of not being there. Call it the unrepeatable economy The playbook of the last two decades was scale reach, lower friction, digitize everything. What is happening now is the opposite. The technology is being used to make live less reproducible, not more. I obviously talk to a lot of event organizers. This is where it usually lands: if the room is designed to be unrepeatable, the system controlling access carries a weight it never carried before. Ticketing becomes the enforcement layer. If it can't protect the room, the model collapses. And the ticket itself is changing. It used to be a key. Show up, scan, enter. Now it is a credential. Named, verified, loaded with the buyer's history, their tier, the rules governing their access. The operator who rents that data out to an intermediary is handing away the most valuable asset in an unrepeatable economy: knowing who was in the room and how to reach them again. When an operator has spent months engineering the perfect room, every broken transfer, every hidden fee, every rejected wallet pass at the gate damages the experience they built. In an economy where the moment is the product, friction is brand damage. Every operator I talk to is wrestling with some version of this. Scarcity, once the ceiling, is now the point. And when scarcity is engineered end to end, the price of being there moves with it. Faster and further than most people in this industry realize. We built a small tool to make that visible. Ten iconic events. Six decades. One guess at a time. ⬇️ https://vivenu.com/price-of-being-there The tools of the last decades were buil for a different model. Whether they can serve the next one is worth a separate edition.

Takeaways

The growing value of “being there”.

In 2024, Gen Z topped every other generation in overall live event spend for the first time. In the U.S., they spent around $75 per month on live, roughly 23 percent more than the average music consumer. At the same time, studies show that 95 percent of Gen Z are interested in turning their online interests into real-life experiences. That combination signals a shift in what this generation actually considers valuable. What actually changed Every generation loves music. That never moved. What changed is the meaning attached to participation. For a long time, status signals were tied to ownership. What you had, kind of reflected who you were. That logic still exists, but it’s no longer dominant. For Gen Z, experiences carry more social weight than possessions, partly because they’re harder to replicate and partly because they exist in front of others. An item can be bought again. A moment cannot. When identity is shaped in public, moments that can be witnessed and referenced start to matter more than objects that simply sit somewhere. The mistake we keep making Many operators still talk about Gen Z as if they’re simply more digital. They are. But that’s not the point. Growing up in a digital environment changed what “valuable” feels like. If you grew up with infinite content, constant access, and endless choice, information stops being scarce. Presence doesn’t. Real access doesn’t. Belonging doesn’t. That’s why live is winning. Not because concerts improved, but because the definition of luxury shifted from ownership to participation. The psychology underneath it Look closer and a few drivers show up consistently. The first is identity signaling. Experiences aren’t just consumed, they’re used. Attending certain events communicates taste and belonging faster than almost anything you can buy. The second is social belonging as reward. The payoff of live moments isn’t limited to the stage. It comes from shared recognition around being there. In one large audience study, 84 percent of people attending interest-based events said they formed close friendships through them. That’s not a side effect. That’s part of the value. The third is how scarcity is perceived. It used to be treated mainly as a constraint. Now, when cultural relevance is involved, scarcity becomes a signal that a moment matters. Some events start behaving less like dates on a calendar and more like social reference points. You see it in how people talk about them afterward. If you haven't been there, you haven't been there. Lines like that don’t describe an event. They describe what it meant to be present. What social media actually changes It’s common to say social platforms drive hype. That’s true, but incomplete. What they really do is extend relevance. For many younger audiences, an event unfolds in three phases: anticipation before, visibility during, narrative after. And the audience keeps the story going long after the lights come on. Clips resurface. Conversations continue. Moments get referenced weeks later. That continuation doesn’t behave like marketing. It behaves like validation. When people share an experience voluntarily, they’re not promoting it. They’re integrating it into how they present themselves. That signal carries more credibility than anything paid. The implication for organizers If experiences function as status signals, ticketing is no longer “just” a system. It becomes brand infrastructure. Not branding in the marketing sense. Brand in the trust sense. Because when status runs through access, every interaction becomes part of the signal. Discovery, purchase, entry, and everything after collapse into one impression. Friction doesn’t register as technical. It registers as brand. A broken queue. Unclear pricing. Confusing policies. Resale chaos. A poor entry access. Those moments don’t just create refunds. They shape how the event is remembered. And if what Gen Z is buying is meaning, protecting the feeling of the moment becomes strategic. So the real question isn’t whether you’re selling tickets. It’s whether you’re designing experiences. One final thought Gen Z doesn’t evaluate events the way older models assumed. Attendance isn’t the metric they instinctively use. Meaning is. Which is why the real decision often isn’t about price or convenience. It’s simpler: Is this a moment I want to be part of, or something I could watch later? In a world defined by abundance, what remains scarce still carries the most value: Being there.

Forbes' 2025 30 Under 30 - Europe - Technology list.↗