From the Indy Star:

http://www.indystar.com/a...ertainment

Fanning enthusiasm

Slickly run fan clubs serve the interests of musicians and music aficionados alike, but they lack the common touch of some of their predecessors.



By Kelly Kendall

Indianapolis Star

September 20, 2002


Leslie Cooper never thought she would join a fan club. In high school, that would have been the height of uncool. And when she finally joined the club for Aerosmith aficionados this spring at the age of 41, it was with a twinge of shame.

"I thought, 'This is such a geeky thing to do,' " the West Lafayette physician says with a laugh.


But now that she's realized the fringe benefits that come with membership, things have changed -- Cooper's a fan clubber and proud of it.

Fan clubs, once made up primarily of the teenybopper set that could have been run by an artist's uncle in his spare time, are becoming a serious business. Increasingly, artists are handing their clubs over to professionals, recognizing untapped revenue sources in yearly dues and merchandise sales. And membership rosters include teens, seniors and everyone in between.

In the pre-Internet days, fan club newsletters typically provided the inside track on what a big star was doing and where he or she was going next. Now, their Web sites do the same thing. But the biggest reason for the clubs' recent success -- and the reason Cooper joined one -- is the special, members-only concert tickets available for when the artist comes through town.

"This new thing has happened with tickets where you can't get good tickets unless you go through a broker," says Cooper. Instead, many fans are turning to official clubs, which often get a certain number of tickets to sell to their members.

Ticketing is the No. 1 reason fan clubs have grown in recent years, says Tony Buechler, who, with wife Denise, serves as webmaster and ticket coordinator for John Mellencamp's club. But unlike many fans, Buechler didn't join just for good seats -- for him, they've just been an extra perk.

Buechler joined the Mellencamp fan club years ago, when it was still run by fans. (Now, Mellencamp's club, like Aerosmith's, is managed by FansRule, a Lowell, Mass.-based company.)

"I wanted to make sure that if John did anything publicly that I could read, see, hear or attend, I knew about it," says Buechler, 26, who runs a farm in DuBois County. "I think fan clubs are great in that regard, for people who want to know more than you're going to see in Rolling Stone on a monthly basis. You can find out where John shot a video, what happened -- I really like that kind of stuff."

Neil Donahue figured there were a lot of people like Buechler when he founded FansRule two years ago. Depending on a band's demographics, Donahue and his staff of 15 might create a fan-club newsletter, membership card, posters, information sheets with detailed facts about the band, publicity photos and CDs and DVDs with rehearsal footage.

Since the incarnation of FansRule, similar companies have sprung up to confirm Donahue's hunch that the fan club business wasn't being played to its full potential.

"When you start looking at fan clubs and what they are, it's really this consumer base with an affinity for a certain product," says Donahue, who worked as a venture capitalist before starting FansRule.

"Slowly, bands and management are realizing, if you've got 20- to 30,000 people who are paying 30 bucks a year and buying tickets and merchandise, it's really a revenue source."

That's also an attraction for record labels, observes Donahue. In the wake of music piracy, labels are even more interested in new ways to make money.

Artists as diverse as Mariah Carey, Carly Simon and the Backstreet Boys increasingly are turning to groups like FansRule to professionally manage their fan clubs. The way Linda Baca sees it, that's sometimes -- but not always -- a good thing.

Baca has been a member of Aerosmith's club since 1980, when she joined at age 18. Last year, she used the ticketing service to buy seats in the 20th row, which was the closest she'd ever been at an Aerosmith concert. But the best part was when a FansRule staffer heard about her seniority, tracked her down, and brought her backstage, where she viewed the concert from the wings.

Still, Baca sometimes misses the early days of fan-clubdom.

"When I would call the club years and years ago, it was, 'Oh, Linda, haven't heard from you in a while,' " recalls Baca, 36, who lives in Noblesville.

"Now it's like, 'Linda who?' It's kind of frustrating because you've been a fan for so long and you think, 'They don't even know my name,' " says Baca.

That may be why some fans' favorite clubs are the ones still doing things the old-fashioned way. Buechler points out that the Mellencamp club, though professionally operated by FansRule and overseen by the singer's management, is still largely run by fans like him. They're the ones who handle ticketing and write the quarterly newsletter.

Often behind the scenes, though, are groups like FansRule, which recognize the value of a well-run network of fans.