Fans are impossible to define. And that’s so fun.
They’re not rational, they’re not consistent, and they’re definitely not optimized. They love one album and hate the next. They obsess over something no one else understands. They build entire worlds out of fragments. And they care too much. Usually for reasons they can’t fully explain. So why I would be able to?
This becomes a huge problem if you’re trying to turn everything into metrics.
I read two pieces recently that stuck with me. One in WIRED (Why Fandom Discourse Feels Extra Cringe Right Now) and another Substack essay from a working musician, Eliza McLamb) about the reality of the music industry and the role fans (real and fake) actually play inside it. It’s a fascinating read!
From the industry/corporate/business side, fans are usually a pain in the ass. They don’t behave the way a campaign wants them to. You can buy streams, manufacture discourse, flood the algorithm with signals, but eventually you’ll hit a wall. You still need real people to care.
The WIRED piece points to something structural that we’re all probably aware of. Fandom didn’t “suddenly get worse.” It got redistributed and the platform where they existed shifted. What used to live in more insulated, self-aware spaces like Tumblr is now playing out on platforms like X where everything is flattened and optimized for reaction. What felt like community now often feels like performance. And mostly toxic.
So now you have two things happening at once.
The system is getting better at simulating fandom. People are here making fake accounts, manufacturing trends, pushing narrative campaigns, and building entire strategies designed to create the appearance of something that’s not real.
Trust in *real human* fan signals is eroding. You don’t know if the account is real. You don’t know if the comments are real. You don’t know if the music, the image, the writing, or the person behind it is real.
So what do we do? Well it’s making us nervous. People trying to monetize fans are trying to measure more, optimize harder, put their trust in engagement rates/saves/shares. People are asking about SEO, GEO, and AI discoverability. Intimacy is getting framed like a lever you can pull. What a horrible approach to intimacy.
Besides, fandom never worked like that. Fandom is irrational.
You can simulate the signal of fandom, you can create the appearance of momentum, and you can even seed the chatter. But you cannot force someone to build a relationship with something on their own terms. That’s the part that makes fans so inconvenient. And also the only part that makes any of this work.
So as a human being who loves to study, read about, and enjoy fandom as a fan herself:
And if you have fans, let them be weird. Stop trying to sand them down into something soft, smooth, and legible. Stop trying to convert every signal into a strategy. The mess is the thing.
The future is going to be full of things that look real. Fandom is one of the few things that still is.
