Knowing Your Fans by Name: How to Sell Tickets in 2026
- May 8
- 3 min read
This is a summary of the "Filling the Room" panel at Take Action x SXSW Music Summit 2026, produced by Artist For Artist®
Imagine running a sales-oriented business without knowing the first thing about any of your customers. It sounds absurd, but it's how the live music industry has operated for most of its history. Artists sell tickets through platforms that don't share buyer data. They build followings on social channels they don't control. They pack rooms full of people they can't contact the next morning.
Anj Fayemi, CEO of Rivet, put it simply during this panel moderated by Fabrice Sergent of Bandsintown: in any other business, that would be considered broken. The old way of operating is not enough. The teams that succeed in 2026 are the ones who know their fans by name:
The Shift from Discovery to Ownership
Jeremy Gruber of management powerhouse Friends at Work traced how the fan relationship has fundamentally moved. Twenty years ago, your relationship was with a label. The label's job was to get the artist on the radio. Today, fans find music through TikTok and follow the artist directly. The relationship is with the artist now. But almost none of the industry's infrastructure is built for that. Ticketmaster doesn't share buyer data. Spotify can't tell you who your listeners are. The artist is at the center of the relationship but doesn't have the tools to manage it.
Gruber's solution: collect first-party data at every opportunity. He has doubled the email list of every artist he works with. For John Legend, that list is well over 200,000. A week before every show, everyone within 100 miles gets an email. It moves tickets.
Give Value, Get Data
Fayemi introduced a useful concept: zero-party data. That's information fans voluntarily share about themselves in exchange for something they want. A ticket giveaway where fans enter their phone number. A waitlist for a sold-out show. A presale signup. Each one is a moment where the fan opts in and the artist learns something real. Gruber added that presale signups are his number one source of email collection. Even fans who don't end up buying tickets still give you intent data.
The panel's most practical tip for emerging artists came from Mark Steiner of GigSalad. His platform books over 25,000 music gigs a year across private and corporate events, paying out $13 million. For artists still building their live business, that kind of gig work keeps you playing music while you're building toward bigger dates. And every private gig is a chance to build a connection in a new market.
Don't Sleep on Email
Gruber was emphatic: email is still the most valuable channel. Social media is important, but you don't own it. Algorithms change every few weeks. TikTok is an entertainment platform, not a social one. You can grow there, but you can't keep what you build. Email lists, on the other hand, are yours. Steiner agreed. And for artists who can't afford a platform yet, Gruber pointed out that Substack is free.
The throughline:
The artists filling rooms in 2026 are the ones who know their fans by name. At Artist For Artist®, we help artists and their teams build that kind of direct infrastructure from the ground up. If you want to talk about how to grow your live business, reach out at artistforartist.com.
