Simon Hennes

Takeaways

How AI Brings Personalization Back, at scale

If you only had one fan, reaching out to them personally, acknowledging their preferences, would be easy. Take your most loyal supporter. You know she brings three friends. You know she buys the minute tickets drop. You know her. Write to her that way, and she buys. Now do it for ten. A long afternoon, but fine. A hundred? Your team is underwater. Push it to a hundred thousand, each fan with a different message, in the moment that fits each one, and no team on earth can keep up. The limit was always time. In my last Edition I wrote that organizers can finally see their most valuable fans. That part is solved, and it runs deeper than most people expect. The fan who loaded a VIP package and left before paying. The one who opened the presale three times and never bought. The season-ticket holder who quietly let her renewal lapse. You can see every one of them. So what was the point of seeing all of it, if you still could not act on it, for everyone, in time? Streaming answered that years ago. Spotify builds a different home screen for every listener, and the next one costs it nothing. Software does the work a person used to. Live never got there. The work stayed human, and human hours do not stretch to a hundred thousand people treated like the only one. Then two things changed at once. AI got good enough to do a week of a marketing team's work, for a hundred thousand fans at once. And it moved to where the data lives, inside the ticketing platform, next to the live sales. The second part is the one people miss. A general AI writes you a nice email. It cannot see your fans, or the show that stopped selling this morning. Put it on your live ticketing data and it can. Ask why a section is soft, and it reads your own numbers and answers. Tell it who to reach and what you want them to feel, and it builds the segment, drafts a version for each fan, picks the moment to send, and hands it back for you to approve. As someone who has the pleasure of running a ticketing company, this is the part I keep coming back to. The shift that matters is being able to treat every fan as an individual, again and again, until a first-time buyer becomes someone who comes back for a decade. When being personal no longer gets harder as your audience grows, every name on the list can become someone you actually know. This is why we built our vivenu AI assistant inside the platform, on the live data. It only earns its keep if it can act on what is true in the moment. None of this makes the fan relationship less human. The machine takes the part that was never human anyway, the copying of one good idea across thousands of people, and hands the team back the hours to decide what the good idea should be. The organizers who feel this first will notice it everywhere. The superfan who gets first access before a dollar goes to ads. The lapsed buyer reached the week she starts to drift, not a year later. The first-timer nudged toward a second show, and a third. Every event feeding an audience they own instead of one they rent, so each show makes the next easier to fill. Every fan, treated like the only one, at the scale of all of them.

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.

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