Your Most Valuable Fans Are Invisible. Here's How to Find Them.

Here's a number that should change how you think about your audience: according to Luminate research, up to 78% of an artist's revenue can come from just the top superfans -- often as few as 6% of the total fanbase. And most artists have zero idea who those fans are.

Jacquelle Horton left a coveted product role at Google to fix this. Her platform, Fave, turns superfan activity into data the industry can actually use.

The Superfan Problem

Jacquelle was the superfan first. At 12, she memorized every hand movement in her favorite artist's videos, printed homemade posters, and quizzed friends on lyrics. She was deeply engaged. But the artist got nothing from that engagement. No data. No revenue. No relationship.

Two decades later, social media gave fans more ways to express fandom but scattered it across platforms where algorithms show posts to 2% of followers. Artists gained millions of followers but lost the ability to identify their most passionate supporters.

"I just realized that that didn't make sense. I'm this crazy passionate fan. They got nothing from me."

What Fave Actually Does

Fave captures fan activity beyond streams and follows -- tattoos, merch collections, concert attendance, friend introductions. It creates verified fan profiles that let superfans find each other, trade merch safely, and get recognized by the artists they support.

The latest tool, FanFinder, gives artist teams the same data. Who are your most influential fans in Paris? Are they going to the upcoming show? Who's been deeply engaged for 30 days but never bought merch?

"The biggest question we're trying to answer right now is: who is listening? Who are they?"

Streaming platforms know listening data. Social platforms know engagement data. Nobody has connected the dots to say: this person in this city is your most valuable fan, and here's how to reach them.

From Google to Music Tech CEO

Jacquelle spent nearly eight years at Google, five driving product at YouTube on the creator side. Leaving was terrifying. "I had nothing to fall back on. I knew the rareness of where I had landed. And here I am saying, let me leave. That's insane."

She was pregnant with her second child when she made the leap. But she'd moonlighted during COVID to validate the idea through hundreds of fan interviews. She entered a startup competition reluctantly, won startup of the year, and raised $4.2 million from Sony Music, Warner Music, Hybe, Concord, Quality Control, TechStars Music, and Female Founders Fund.

What This Means for You

Whether you're an artist or a studio owner, the principle is the same: your most valuable supporters are probably invisible to you.

For artists: start tracking who shows up repeatedly. Who buys merch? Who brings friends? Who comments on everything? Those people are worth 10x a casual listener. Build for them first.

For studio owners: your best customers are the ones who book repeatedly, refer other musicians, and choose your room over cheaper options. If you're managing bookings through DMs and spreadsheets, you have no data on who these people are.

Booking through a platform changes that. You see who books, how often, and what they need. Over time, you build the same kind of customer intelligence that Fave builds for artists. You stop guessing and start knowing.

Key Takeaways

• Up to 78% of revenue comes from superfans. Identifying and engaging your top supporters is the highest-leverage thing you can do.
• Fans are scattered across platforms with no unified profile. Tools like Fave are closing that gap.
• Validate before you leap. Jacquelle did hundreds of interviews while still at Google. She knew the problem was real before she left.