FANBASE FOUNDATIONS: THE FUNDAMENTALS OF AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT

A practical workshop for bands/artists ready to move beyond posting and hoping. Learn how to identify your ideal audience, grow a genuine fanbase, and keep people coming back — both online and at your gigs. We’ll cover essential tools like email lists, social media strategy, live show tactics, and local networking — all tailored for artists working at a grassroots level. Whether you’re building from zero or refining your approach, this session gives you the foundation to turn casual listeners into committed supporters.

This workshop is open access and has been created with local musicians in mind, who are consciously considering how to grow their audiences. Whether you have released music or not, you will be thinking about how to grow listeners, gig goers and, ultimately, fans that will follow your journey supporting you along each step.

Our goal at Future Yard is to provide the opportunity for local/bands and artists to headline our live room when the time is right for them. We have created a favourable show budget so local acts can use their local headliners as a vital stream of revenue. The other key element is to use your live opportunities, whether that’s as a support act, on an all-dayer, or a headline, to try out different ways of audience development which you can consider when putting together plans for release and wider live activity in different places.

Over this two hour session we will be exploring different methods of audience development, looking at building community and making the most of the different tools we have available to us. We will look at the discovery of new audiences alongside keeping our existing fans engaged. We will also look at how we can turn listeners into fans, which is particularly prevalent in this age of streaming and social media moments.