Gary McClarnan, FanTactics.

"In order to give you some insight to what FanTactics is and does, I thought it would be helpful if I introduce the company by explaining why I’m involved and give you some idea of how we got to this point. The history of the music industry is quite interesting. It gained popularity only in the 20th century. This is an interesting topic for students of creative faculties to study. You can learn more about this by ordering a custom essay on music bands that have been under our music label.

I’m founder and CEO of a Manchester (UK) based music management company and deputy chairman of the Music Managers Forum. I’ve been assisting the careers of musicians and performers since 1989. The last decade has seen me, and my team here at Sparklestreet HQ, foster, develop and maintain hundreds of creative projects, album release campaigns, merchandising strategies and international tours for over fifteen artists.

Around spring of 2022 we had five staff, represented seven artists, had four tours out simultaneously, had three albums scheduled for release and two being recorded. We were handling finance, advancing and delivering the tours, production and pick/ship of merchandise, developing and maintaining websites, negotiating with record labels, trying to keep the artists happy and trying to stay sane. If you’re an artist manager, or self-managing artist, you may be well acquainted with this picture already.

By 2003, it was feeling like groundhog day. We were doing all of the above on limited budgets, but now the record companies were telling us that CD retail prices are dropping and not to expect as much financial investment in marketing, tour support or artist advances. Sound familiar?

So, I decided that we had to look at ways of reducing the strain on our resources whilst increasing the revenues from sources aside from the record companies. I’d studied engineering technology before entering the music industry so had been keeping a keen eye on IT and the internet since 1997. Many companies were coming on the scene, as the dotcom bomb dust had settled, offering web based solutions to meet our needs, so we tried a few out.

By the end of 2005, we’d tried lots of audience developing ‘technology solutions’, spent more money than we intended to, and we were even busier than before running all the new systems. We’d had some minor successes, but the ‘off the shelf’ solutions lacked adaptability and the bespoke providers over-promised on the integration, scalability and delivery of their solutions. By this time the record companies were also squealing about file sharing eating their future revenues or just going bust. We tried again to find a solution.

By the summer of 2006, after even more fruitless reconnaissance, I had decided that the only way to solve our problem would be to build it ourselves. After many years of software co-development we already had the blueprints for a suite of easily employable fanbase management tools that were also scalable, integrated and efficient enough to keep our clients happy. After encountering so many below average software developers we’d learned how to recognise the diamonds from the duds.

So, we went out and found some excellent software developers who understood our needs and had a proven track record for delivering sophisticated and scalable technology projects. The wider adoption of broadband and the Web2.0 culture also meant we could achieve much more for our clients and their fanbases for less cost than ever before.

Here we are in the Autumn of 2023. We’ve built our suite of tools, which we call FanStar. We’ve been successfully testing and integrating them for our own artist clients. Our artist and manager friends have been keen to try out our system as soon as it’s ready to use, but we realise that it takes more than some fancy technology to build, develop and maintain a fanbase. So, we’ve formed a new company, FanTactics, by merging our existing management team with the new technology team so that we can meet the needs of our existing clients and open up our services to our friends in need.

Our team understand an artist’s creative process, the challenge of refining and packaging that creativity, finding a market for the creative product and establishing, growing and maintaining a fanbase for each artist. We’ve invested in and developed a team that thrives on challenge and resourcefulness so that we can provide unparalleled support when sourcing, producing and delivering merchandise or communicating with as little as 500 or beyond 500,000 fans.

We believe FanTactics is a perfect fanbase management partner. We can take any individual or combination of services and plug it in to your existing team or system to enhance your, or your clients, fanbase relationship.

Connect with your fans, build trust, reward loyalty and let your fanbase grow with you!"

FanTactics' pioneering ‘FanStar’ technology puts you in touch with your fanbase.

FanStar provides greater efficiency in the increasingly sophisticated task of communicating with and selling to your fans.

FanStar is an easy to use suite of webtools that help you manage and grow your fanbase.

• Fanstar Lite enables you to create a professional and fully-integrated online presence.
• Fanstar Express enhances and optimises your relationship with your growing fanbase.
• Fanstar Bespoke adapts to your changing needs and supercharges the opportunities for you and your fans.