Dear Pennies & Pens,
I attended From the Backseat to the Big Stage: Driving Global Breakthroughs in Key Music Markets during Music Biz 2026. In my first Music Biz 2026 recap, The Conversations That Stayed With Me, I wrote about the ideas that followed me home from the conference. This panel gave me another one to sit with: what moves music?
Speakers
- Sarah Landy, SVP, FUGA
- Adrian Binns, Director of Global Artist Relations, Deezer
- Dot Levine, SVP, Vevo London
- Francesca Caladra, VP, Unified Music Group
- Gil Gastelum, Founder & President, Cosmica Artists
The panel explored how artists can break into new markets and grow a global fan base. Throughout the discussion, speakers touched on touring, fan data, short-form video, and emerging genres.
From Local to Global
One of the clearest ideas to come out of this session was that global growth often starts locally.
Afrobeats was one example raised during the conversation. Before it became a global success story, it first had to connect with the communities and cultures that shaped it.
The same idea showed up in the touring conversation. Artists do not become global because they appear on a playlist one day and magically stay there. They build momentum market by market, city by city, through festivals, clubs, and live shows that help them connect with listeners in real life.
That point felt especially important because it pushed back against the idea that global growth is purely digital. Streaming and short-form video can absolutely expand an artist’s reach, but they do not replace the slower work of building a fan base in specific places first.
For all the conversation about global growth, this panel kept circling back to a much simpler truth: before music becomes a global success, it usually has to resonate locally first.
Fan Culture Is More Than Streaming
As the conversation turned to fan data and global growth, I kept coming back to one question: what happens to the parts of fandom that don’t neatly fit into a streaming dashboard?
Streaming data is easier to access, organize, and analyze than physical sales. Physical products require more coordination and reporting across retailers, whereas streaming platforms already have that data built in.
If physical sales no longer matter, why are artists and labels still investing so heavily in them?
Across Pop, R&B, and K-Pop, physical releases are still being packaged, promoted, and sold as meaningful parts of an artist campaign. Vinyl variants, signed CDs, exclusive covers, collector’s editions, cassette releases, and merchandise bundles are all designed to give fans more ways to buy into an album era beyond simply pressing play.
Olivia Rodrigo’s latest rollout is one recent example. Her team has been pushing physical copies of the album across multiple formats, versions, and variants, and the strategy clearly extends beyond simply making the product available. After I added one of her albums to my cart and left it there, I got an abandoned cart email reminding me to come back and finish the purchase. A follow-up like that only happens when the sale is still worth chasing.
That moment is what made this part of the discussion so interesting to me. The issue is not that physical fan behavior has disappeared. It is that physical fan behavior is harder to measure than streaming. Those are two very different realities.
Streaming platforms make it easy to see where an album is being played and by whom. Physical sales require more work. Albums sold online, through artist stores, independent retailers, and major chains do not all fit into a single dashboard. The data exists, but it takes more effort to gather, compare, and interpret.
That gap becomes even more noticeable when the conversation shifts to superfans, pop-ups, and fan experiences. Those are not side notes to an artist campaign. They are part of how fandom is built, monetized, and sustained. If the industry wants a fuller picture of how fans support artists, it has to look beyond the metrics that are easiest to pull and start paying closer attention to the ones that take more work to understand.
What Moves Music After Fans Press Play
Streaming can tell the industry where attention is happening. It cannot fully explain what fans do with that attention once it turns into loyalty.
A stream can show that someone pressed play. It cannot show whether that same person bought multiple album versions, showed up to a pop-up, entered a contest for a chance to see an artist in person, or spent money on merch and live experiences. It cannot show who keeps coming back after release week, who convinces their friends to listen, or who is willing to travel for a concert when the tour finally hits their city.
That was one of the most interesting tensions running through this panel. The conversation moved easily between streaming data, fan behavior, superfan engagement, and live experiences, but those things do not all live in the same place. Some of them are easy to quantify. Others are much harder to track, even though they may reveal far more about long-term fan behavior.
For me, the bigger takeaway was this: streaming can measure attention, but fandom reveals long-term commitment.
And there it is. de la Pen…All Pen Everything. With us, keeping it real never goes wrong.
