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Whether you’re at a concert or a sports game, there will be screaming fans, tears, sweat, and maybe even a little blood. But while both industries deal in passion, sports has gained the upper hand in understanding, measuring, and monetizing it.
In American football, there’s a term for a team’s most dedicated fans: The 12th Man. They see the crowd as an extra player, just as important to the game as the ones on the field. For music, it’s the 5th member.
This term was originally used to describe a manager or producer behind the scenes, but today, it increasingly refers to fans who cross borders, queue at the crack of dawn, and keep fandom alive online.
To be clear, music isn’t sports, and it shouldn’t try to be. The goal is for artists to build stronger relationships with the very people who support them, not to mass-industrialize fandom. But there are some valuable takeaways we can learn from the sports industry.
Know your fans like a team knows its season ticket holders
Sports organizations treat their data like an ecosystem. They understand seat preferences, merch buying habits, and digital engagement, and use this to power tailored presales, loyalty programs, and sponsor integrations.
The Golden State Warriors use 30+ sources of customer data and 100+ million data points to personalize every app user’s experience.
These teams have a bit of a leg up here: season ticket holders are committed fans putting their money where their mouth is, week after week, year after year. For artists, fan data is scattered across labels, streaming platforms, promoters, venues, and ticketing companies. It’s more like artists are renting access to their audience than actually owning the relationship.
The goal here isn’t complete control, but meaningful connection. By building interaction through presales, memberships, contests, and immersive moments, artists can create a shared data layer that benefits everyone in the ecosystem while strengthening the artist-fan bond. Everyone wins!
Measure the right stats – not just the loudest cheers
In sports, every metric matters because everything is connected: attendance, app usage, merchandise sales, even concession-buying behavior. This feedback loop turns fan behavior into business intelligence.
Music can benefit from operating in the same way. Instead of relying solely on generic stream or ticket sales data, imagine tracking fan lifetime value: the listener who starts as a Spotify follower, becomes a tour attendee, buys vinyls, and eventually joins a fan club.
A full overview of fan likes, dislikes, and past behavior allows artists to understand who their listeners are, how they connect to the work, and where that connection deepens over time. This lets artists grow their fan base intentionally while staying true to their creative identity – they decide when to go big, when to stay intimate, and how to meet fans in ways that feel authentic. This strengthens the artist-fan bond first, and the commercial ecosystem second.
Some artists are already catching on. Before his 2024 show in Los Angeles, Fred Again hosted a secret listening party, identifying and inviting 150 fans who had either attended his very first LA show three years prior or purchased his limited-edition Tiny Desk vinyl. Playing the data-gathering long game allowed him to give a valuable experience to an identifiable, key group of fans.
Build two-way relationships, not one-way broadcasts
Sports fandom is big on participation. Fans are asked to predict plays, vote for MVPs, and engage live. This fosters ownership – think about how sports fans call it their team and their players.
Music has long flirted with this idea. David Bowie’s 1990 Sound + Vision Tour invited fans to vote on setlists via a global telephone poll (1-900-2-BOWIE-90 has a good ring to it). Mail-in ballots were even available in areas where this tech wasn’t supported.
Today, this two-way participation is easier, faster, and extends further. Look at Mother Mother’s TikTok resurgence that boosted their mid-2000s songs to virality, bringing the Canadian band international fame over a decade later. Songs like “Hayloft” were remixed and reinterpreted by users, introducing their music to a whole new generation and growing touring demand exponentially. Fans didn’t just consume their music – they co-created and revived it.
Think like a league, not just a label
The ecosystem of festivals, promoters, labels, managers, venues, and ticketing platforms primarily operates in parallel rather than in sync.
But this fragmentation is an opportunity.
Imagine instead: unified fan profiles spanning a festival, an artist’s tour, and a streaming platform. Imagine connecting a fan’s event attendance history with their listening behavior to power smarter presales, tailored rewards, and deeper community experiences. Interconnection over competition. Some forward-thinkers are already experimenting with this, but the landscape is still fresh, and the potential for growth is huge.
Making highlights out of headliners
In sports, the game doesn’t end at the final whistle. It lives on in highlights, behind-the-scenes content, and storylines that stretch engagement across an entire season.
Music can do this, too. We’ve seen some big names start already:
- Oasis’ reunion was more than a tour – it became a cultural storyline fueled by cryptic teasers, archival footage, and a whole lot of nostalgia. They kept each show alive after it was over with pop-up merch drops, in-the-wild fan videos, and post-show recap content
- And with a four-hour-long tour film currently in production, the reunion may never end
- Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have transformed tours into immersive universes where fans dress the part, film everything, and follow multiple tour dates like season ticket holders
- The FOMO is real. Fans who couldn’t get a ticket to the hottest show in town lived vicariously through live streams and concert footage on social media
- Dead & Company’s Sphere residency used immersive production and storytelling to turn each show into a distinct moment
- With trippy visuals and 580,000 square feet of video space, they gave fans an experience that was impossible not to talk about
You can count on fans extending the moment, if you give them something to talk about. Every show becomes a chapter. Every chapter becomes content. Every piece of content extends connection.
The bottom line
Music and sports have the same heartbeat: their fans. But sports has figured out how to turn their passion into long-term relationships that drive loyalty, revenue, and cultural staying power.
For music, planning for the future shouldn’t be limited to the next tour or festival. It should be about identifying your 5th members, understanding what makes them tick, and rewarding their loyalty on an ongoing basis.