From Fans to Frontlines: How Lansdowne, Prospect Hill, and FanFlowy Are Powering a European Tour

So we're here on Make Our Music podcast and we're here to discuss the fact that Prospect Hill is now going out to support Lands down on tour. Lands down is touring Europe and now is on their fifth tour in Europe. Right. Is that we established fifth tour, second headline run and you know, what we want to say is, you know, fan flowy and make our music. Our systems that we've implemented into our own tech plan platform and our community are the results of this is the results. Us having the ability to go on this tour lands on, being able to build this tour and then have the ability to bring us out. It's all relative. You know, we've been able to build this individually as bands and then collectively and then now as a company and all of these strategies that we've all utilized to help our own projects. We've been able to help other bands, projects and other artists. And so here we are now about to embark on a European tour as a collective in April, which is exciting and a big shout out to Lands on right now for taking us and for them, you know, currently, hopefully by the time this is out they'll have a top 10 at. In Germany.

Yeah. In GSA. Oh, knock on wood. Hopefully nothing changes.

Yes, yes.

But it will be the second top 10, which is crazy.

Yeah, that's awesome. So people know we're going to be doing behind the scenes for everything and sharing all the time all throughout the tour so you can see what these guys are going through in the day to day and, and with yeah shenanigans as well as business, you know, how to, how to manage and navigate what's going on in this world wide event

and also like the interactions with the fans, the fan experiences and how we translate that back to fan Flowy and how Fan Flowy translated those fans to being there.

Yeah, well, you're gonna be able to see like the command center of this tour between our, our team and theirs and ultimately sharing a lot of the strategy and the fan acquisition and then making sure that we're, you know, following up with these fans post shows, post tour and then you know, ensuring that all of these, these pieces, there's a lot that go regards to like pre show, day of show, post show and in regards to logistics but then also the fan experience like Sean's saying. So what's great is there's so many things we have to handle right on the road. It's just like every day is, is it's a new day. Sometimes it's like Groundhog Day. But Ultimately, there's a lot that needs to get done. So having fan flu, fan flow as a tool to ensure a lot of these things don't fall through the cracks is really, really helpful, 100%. So we'll be, you know, documenting that. You'll get to see the behind the scenes of just the tour in general, you know, and one thing I'd like to, you know, touch upon these two bands. We're family ultimately. We've been, we've been playing together over 15 years and touring, touring the country and now we get to join them overseas, which is really exciting. But we're, you know, we're, we're a close, close knit group. You know, we've all been on the road together. We all started companies together. We all, you know, interact on them daily. And it's, it's pretty, it's, it's cool. It's, it's, it's cool that music has allowed us to do this because this is going to be my first time in Europe, you know, which is pretty cool.

Same.

And I know Edgar, you, you've only been out there because of Godsmack.

I was a bass tech for Godsmack for Robbie Merrill. It was awesome. It's amazing. It's totally different architecture. It's, you know, the people are different. Everything's different. So I'm pumped that I'll have you guys there with me this time. Last time I was, you know, it was all business, work, work, work.

But wait, what do you think's going on this time? Fun.

Fun.

I got to be with my boys.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's a singer now. You can do it.

Yeah, I went from. So Mark's holding it down.

He's in the back.

But I'm not talking about so many jokes.

There's a lot.

Oh, that one pack.

Exactly.

So aside from seeing every bit of what's going on, like, like he said, these guys are legit. Friends, family, forever, ever, ever. So it's a very weird thing. It's like a traveling circus. I'm guessing. It's. There's more circus vibes, I think.

Little guy. We got the.

We actually share a band member now.

That's right.

You know.

Oh, yeah.

Shout out, Jeff.

Shout out to water guy.

It's more like one of those things in Florida. Time check.

All right, you guys done this week? All right, we'll take him next week.

It's like a little Swiss Army.

Just so happens it landed on the same week. Now he's there. So double duty. No, it's, it's cool. I'm. I'm really. I'm really pumped. I'm really pumped for. You know, everything's been working well. And, you know, ultimately there's been success on this tour in regards to the.

The.

The pre sales and that, you know, there's a lot that's been. Been working through Fen Flow as well to get us there.

Well, yeah, and speaking to the pre sale, like, it's important to say, like. Like, this is just a gimmick that we, like, try to sell people. We are using this in our everyday lives as. As musicians for ourselves, almost, like, first and foremost, like, we built it almost selfishly for ourselves.

Yeah, no, it wasn't almost. It absolutely was. Can we run someone listening right now that doesn't exactly know what we're talking about? Let's run them through the process.

Yeah. Well, ultimately, like, it started off where I was having, you know, I was creating these, like, conversation maps on Instagram where if, you know, when someone followed you, I want you to DM them. So I would DM them a welcome, and then I would open up a conversation. Because back in the day, we were super successful on MySpace and it was because we were, you know, manually adding 500 people a day, and then we were direct messaging all of them. So our inbox was just nonstop, and we're just, like, creating conversation with these people. And so. And that led to these people turning into fans, and those fans started showing up to shows and purchasing merchandise. So I mimicked that into Instagram.

And wait, what happened?

One day it disappeared.

Yeah, MySpace stopped existing. And so did all of your fans, essentially. Not all, but we got.

Initially, yeah, it was.

It was upsetting because it was like a hundred, you know, hundreds of thousands of fans on there, millions of streams, and it was, like, gone overnight. And so I definitely have PTSD from that. So ensuring that we capture that was

always a catalyst for making this happen. He's always been part of the story.

Yeah. And so that's been a big piece. Right. And so that is, you know, obviously, why we ensure that we capture the. The information of all of our fans. We get their name, their phone number, email location, and preferred streaming platform, so we can contact them directly. You know, what if social media is down, right? We've seen Tik Tok.

Yeah. A little cliff note into this. Don't forget all your followers on Facebook, all your followers on Instagram, Tik Tok, whatever. Those are not yours. Those are Facebooks. Those are Tik Toks. And they take them with them when they go.

You Know, or they turn you off if they want to.

Yeah, they turn you off. Or they, or, you know, they could be down one day because of some issues. What if it's your release day?

That happened all week.

This week it happened. Tick Tock was gone for one day.

Yeah.

And everybody was. Their pants.

And then Instagram's had hiccups where there was. Things weren't, you know, there was a bad bug at one point and people, people's posts weren't populating. So like there's always things. And then ultimately you don't know if it's, you know, that say they sell the company or something, you know, who knows? But it's out of your control ultimately, is what we're saying.

Right.

Not your plat, your platform.

And you know, one of the biggest things is this happens all the time, that we have to try to get the page back, but people's pages will get hacked too.

Oh my God. All the time. It's the worst, right?

And you don't have to start, you have to start a new Instagram, Facebook, whatever, because you're. You literally can't get into your account. So all those fans, you have to try to find a way to get them to follow you again.

I even say the same thing. When they give you a link tree, I'm like, well, it's sending you Spotify, not your platform, sending YouTube, not your platform, sending them to Instagram, not your platform. If there was a button that sent them to your platform, it would be magic, right?

Yeah, we have the button.

That is the button.

And so let you go back. Like there's nothing more important than owning that audience, you know?

Right, yeah. And so ultimately it's like you want to obviously utilize social media to aggregate fans. Like you're using it as a tool to find fans, but you need to gather them and bring them into your own list and then ultimately into a community where you can contact them directly.

It's the vehicle, not the destination.

Exactly. And so, you know, that's where it kind of. Obviously there was one feature that led me to start, like building the automations that sparked the beginning of fanvloy, which was the DM sequences that I was creating, where it was really just like if someone says this, say that, and I created this sheet for all the artists. And ultimately what we were doing was trying to find out where they stream, get them to stream your music, then get them to give us their email, their phone number, get their contact information, and then get them to take other actions, follow us on subscribe to us on YouTube, follow on Spotify. So once we had an understanding and a relationship with that fan that just followed you and just found your music was like, oh my God, I love you. If you ask them to take these actions, they will, right? And so it's like about creating that conversation, speaking to them. And I realized, wait a minute, we can automate this system. So we created an automation for that. And then obviously that opens up the conversation with the fan and then ultimately you want to then take it over as a human because now you're creating a real relationship, but it sparks that conversation. So it initializes it and then you, you know, if you're growing and you're getting, you know, 10 to 100 new followers a day on Instagram, it's a lot of work if you're doing it manually. So it's nice when it can be done automated. But then from there it's like once you get the information, the next step is to then get them through an automated email situation, automated text message, DMs, and then obviously the follow through for any new releases, new shows, new merch drops. So it's all about having these systems in place so as the fans come in, you can continue to nurture them, you can continue to communicate with them and get them to take the other actions that are needed in order to continue to grow you.

It's not like a, a revolutionary concept. There's been a sign up thing on, on websites forever, but once they signed up, nothing happened. Nothing, right?

Nothing.

And you never sent out a newsletter? You never did.

Nobody did.

It was, you know what I mean?

Like we didn't either. And I know it because it was like I'd have, you know, we had manual signups back in the day, name and email.

Right. And who was putting those into mailchimp?

Nobody. I'm the psychopath. I would put them in. But you know, like how frequent was I putting out emails? I'm guilty of that, right? And so because that's something that you have to continue fall. And then at one point, in order to have an active mailchimp with that amount of subscribers, you'd have to pay so much money. And I was like, this is ridiculous. The frequency of what I'm doing wasn't justifying the cost. So that was the other issue. And so now we've solved all of these issues, right? And once we capture the information, there's automated emails and text messages that go out to get them to take these actions. And then it continues to further do that for you as a new release comes, as a show gets booked, all that, you know.

And the business world has always had these things to help them with their customers and keep customer retention at a high. But nothing has existed that was specific for music.

Because you want to know why it's so easy to take advantage of musicians. And it's just. That's just the game. Well, in the game forever, it's that.

And then also the people that do build these systems out don't really understand the music industry.

That's true too.

And the fan journey and fan experience is a little different. And the things that are actually like weighed in order to actually move an artist forward is not really known by everybody. Right?

Yeah. And that's what I always. We're not marketers that made a music system. We're music guys that made a marketing system that we needed to do things that like, this is just what needs to happen.

I make sure I tell every call, listen, we're not marketing dudes. We're rock and roll dudes, bro. They figured it out.

I need an easy way to let people know when I have a new song coming out that it's coming out. Give them a reminder, let them know to pre save, Let them know it's out. Let them know to put it on their playlist when it is out. I need an easy way to do that.

Let them know there's new merch. Let them know that they can get the upsell when they get that like all of these things that didn't exist before all of a sudden exist. Yeah.

We need a system in place to then grow your fan base every day so that you're making sure that your content is being exposed to new audience and then those audiences being able to be captured into your fan list and then that fanless is being invited into a community. And then from the community, they're, you know, invited into an exclusive offer, which is like basically you perform live at a show that you're opening for a bigger band. Right. That's what I tell everybody. It's like every, every artist understands this. Like, Matt, when you play a show and you're opening for a bigger band, that crowd isn't there to see you, but it's your job to get their attention. And there's going to be a percentage of those people at that show that go, oh my God, I really love this artist. I love this band. I want to meet them. And so then they're going to come up to you at the merch table after you play and you're going to have a conversation with them. Hey, what's up, man? You guys are great. Oh, awesome. Thank you so much. With your name. Oh, my name's Jim. Awesome, Jim, where are you from? All from the town. It opens up this conversation and then you're like, hey, by, would you like to sign up for our newsletter? Just, you know, here's the iPad. You know, that way you know when we're going to be in town next. Sure, I'll do it right now. Awesome. I'm going to follow you on Instagram right now.

The QR code.

Scan the QR code.

Back in the day, my band opened for a little band called Linkin park. And they essentially did that. Every dude in the band went in the crowd and said, what's up? To every single person that wanted to stay. None of them left until it was over. They weren't having scanning QR codes. But that's how you do it. They are proof of concept.

When Lanzan was on the tour with Puddle of Mud, that's how he ate food. Every guy got 10 CDs. You, you go into the crowd, oh, yeah, that, that money was your dinner money, right?

Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, ultimately the goal from there is then, you know, as we all know, you know, then it's there at the merch table. So like, hey, you want to buy a T shirt, right? And so that solidifies that whole, you know, obviously process there. And then ultimately after that, once you have their information, you have the ability to get them back to the show, get them to listen to your next release. It's, you know, fan flowy strategy is based off of that experience. We're just like, like recreating it and doing it digitally online. It's literally the same thing. Because instead of, you know, you know, playing live or whatever, we're, we're basically interrupting them on, on social media and they're going, oh, we're targeting the right audience, you know, fans of similar bands. And they're going, oh, wow, this is cool. And you know, thousands of people are seeing it a month and not all of them are going to give a shit. Right? We don't care about those people. We care about the ones that do give a shit.

And they jump through hoops to prove they do well.

And they're like, wow, this is awesome. I will join, I will join the community and I will buy merch within two days of learning about this band. Which is insane me, but it works.

It does. Yeah, it absolutely does. And like kind of going Back to what I was saying that we practice what our. What we preach with this thing is. So when we did our first headline tour in Europe, the Here to State tour, there was a lot of things plaguing that, but, you know, attendance was what it was. Here we are, you know, I think a little over two months out from this run and we've already doubled the sales because we didn't put a fan flow strategy in place on the last one. We didn't have time. Whatever we did on this one, we had a lot of lead up time. And we are already double the amount of sales we did on the last tour with two months left of selling.

Still.

Unbelievable. Yeah.

And they're American dudes from New England going to Europe. That's pretty dope, right?

So it. It fucking works.

Yeah, yeah.

No, it's. It's exciting and I'm pumped for, you know, the. The reason why Prospect Hill is even kind of back in general. Like the, you know, what kind of riled everybody up was like, hey, guys, we've built this system and we have this team now and we can turn this thing on. And look at what Lands down is doing right now because they're still and they're working. Let's get back active. Let's do it. And so that's what brought us back out, is the fact that we have all this. We built this and this is what's making us excited again. And now, you know, performing again, we, you know, slowly turned it on. Obviously now with Edgar as the lead singer, we needed to introduce the fans with the new sound in order to move forward. Now we're here, you know, release a song collaboratively, Victim with Taproot, which everybody in this room is involved in, which is pretty cool. Which is pretty much how our music is now. And now we're performing live and get the opportunity now to go overseas. And it's just starting, you know, and now. And now we got, you know, Glenn going a million miles an hour, booking shows left and right across the US Thinking, you know, everybody's going to, you know.

Well, which is awesome because like, another thing we're preaching to the everybody in the fan flowy system is you got to be putting all the other bands on that are in the system. We have a whole. Yes, we have a whole community where everybody on the platform can speak to each other and trade shows, and we're doing it for them too. Every show that we're doing in the U.S. we're putting a Fan Floyd band on that show.

Yes. And that's one thing that we actually need to do this week is like, put that post up inside of the community and see if there's any other. For now that we got some of the dates fulfilled. Right. Like, Glenn's been, we're trying to, you know, wrangle him and bring him back in, but he's, like, ready to book the world tour another level. But, like, we're like, all right, we're ready to go back out, all of us, but we're all very still busy. We have families, you know, so it's

gotta make sense, pay attention and have a work ethic and you might be able to hop on a tour, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. So it's exciting and the system's working. We're proving it and we're going to document the whole thing. So you're going to see all the fun of the, the tour of, of the crew, of the team, of the, you know, the fans, and then you're going to see all the logistics on the back end as well. And, you know, you see the ups and downs because, you know, those, that's the fun part. That's the drama.

Yeah. They're going to happen.

And it's what separates the winners from the losers.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's like touring stuff. And I'm sure it's even tougher when you're overseas when, you know, he, you can't really fully understand what the hell's going on all the time. So I, I, I can't, you know, I can't fully imagine exactly how tough it will be, but it, you know, it'd be great because these guys have already done it five times, so I'm not too worried about it. Sean's back. He's made it back alive, so I'm good. I don't feel too bad. Not worried.

So what you're saying is if Sean can do it, anyone can do it.

Yeah. It's so easy, you guys, but, but, yeah, no, Very cool. Is there any you want to add Johnny, at all?

I'm excited for the food. I think I was trying to say that earlier. The architecture like you were talking about, that's going to be dope.

I think that's awesome.

Just pl.

If we all haven't been out to Europe, really say we just all want to go eat there.

Yeah. That's the whole reason we actually booked this tour, for eating reasons. But a lot of.

As someone that actually gets on calls with people for fan flowy, I'll be honest, and I'm Not. I'm not playing for the. The camera for this. I want people to know that we do this. So this is going to be some massively important piece of content. We're like, here, just watch this. You know we're gonna have that. And now we can show, like, look, just. Just watch this. Even if it's three minutes, even if it's three hours of the greatest rock and roll you've ever seen. Yeah, but we. We don't have, like, video proof of concept. We can. Someone will say, hey, can you tell me some of the bands that are on Fan Flowing? Yes, I can give you a giant list, but watch this. That's what I'm. I'm cool. Yeah, that's. I'm actually looking forward to that.

We're gonna document this whole process we already started.

It's gonna be a movie.

It's a movie.

It's gonna be a movie.

Yes. This is gonna be Jim's debut as the.

Making a film.

This is his James Cameron moment.

Yeah, this is a Jim Cameron moment.

Have a knot. All right. But yeah, ultimately, you know, we're gonna just continue to maybe do you know, we can still integrate these into the podcast as well. We'll try to do it while we're on the road when we're out there. That would be cool to have this set up.

That would be cool.

Yeah. And so. And then we can rotate everybody or something. Boom.

We'll make that 70 show camera rig.

Oh, also, I have Joe Hermes spinning around, obviously. Shout out to Joe. Joe Hermes. He's. He's.

Shout out Joe.

You know, he's direct support on the tour.

And he's up Joe.

What up Joe and howdy. We're actually going to be sitting down with him next week about fan flowing. Gas him all set up and. And going. So.

Hell yeah.

Exciting. Yeah.

And I'm guessing you'll see him on the pod when we're on the road.

Yes, I'd like to make sure he's on for sure. And then if there's any other. Oh, are we. Are we going to be able to get any of the bands from overseas from Fan Flowy on there? I know there's a couple.

There's a. There's a couple spots. I'm going to try to fill some people in.

Oh, there's a great band from Germany that wrote a song about Mark. Can we just talk about that real quick?

Brilliant. Oh, my God. Yeah.

Mark and marketing.

Just Mark and marketing. Someone else. The marketing today.

Marketing. Anthony.

You know what?

It's it's actually good.

I will give. We'll give it the shout out. Go check out pumpkin jumping mark and marketing.

Yeah, I, you know, it's like funny because I'm like, are they. Is this insult give back? I don't know, is it like a dig if it's not? Are they just trying to be playful to like get my attention? But they never responded to me, so I'm like, maybe they, maybe they, they

put a lot of work.

They wrote a song and record and

they put thought into it, like everything.

Context. We need context for the view.

Yeah. So I, I had a call with a band like I always do, and, and I was explaining to them all the, you know, the features of, of fan flowing, how we can help them. And ultimately, yeah, there's a fee for what we do. It's a, it's our work. This is all we do every day. Right. So, you know, and I, we.

It costs money to do that. We put your ad budget, but we've

also made it super, super affordable for artists and we even create like payment plans to help them. Right. And we've, we've keep, we've whittled it down and down and down to a place like we, Our margin is so fucking small.

Right.

So like we figured out a way to like include every band at pretty much any budget ultimately. And if you don't have a 500 month budget all into enhance your marketing, have a full team and an advertising team on your team. It's like, dude, that's every band. Every member in your bench should sacrifice $5 a day from their coffee. All right, let's go.

You know what's hilarious is obviously a lot of time and resources went into that instead of. They did that instead of making fans. Yeah.

So what really happened is these guys kind of took offense to Mark as if he was trying to rip them off. And he certain isn't. But they wrote a song and then they put it out on Spotify. Yeah.

And then they emailed me and I was like, wait a minute, this is about me.

This is cool.

And I was like, this is hilarious. But I was like, guys, I'm from Boston, not Tennessee. Like, if you're going to spend the money and write a song and produce it, at least get the facts right.

I will say this, that's the kind of stuff that only happens to you when you put yourself out to the world.

You know what I'm saying?

Well, it's got at least five streams, but it could have a hell of a lot more or if you guys want to get on another call.

Yeah, we listen to it.

We actually just did more for your record than you guys did. Okay. Oh, no, that's.

I need to listen to this. See, I'm gonna listen to it now.

Yeah, it kicks ass.

M from Tennessee.

Yeah, the voices. They make like, voices.

Oh, it's great.

Again,

it's funny because they're like making fun of my boss and accent, but then they call me Mark from Tennessee, so I'm like, you know, they're German because they just don't understand

Russian.

I saw their, like, Instagram page and it was all in Russian.

So I was like, are you sure?

Tennessee and Boston are exactly the same to them.

We take it all back. We take it all back. I think they are Russian. Russian. We take it back.

Said Moscow in their Spotify.

Oh, maybe they are Russian. I don't. Maybe that. Maybe the issue is them transferring money.

Then maybe it doesn't work.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think that might have been what it was too, though. I don't. I honestly don't remember the details because it was, it was. It was so long ago, to be honest.

Either way, it made me a fan.

I like it.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, hey, shots are fired. It's time to return the dis track.

Oh, yeah, here we go.

Yeah, we're releasing the disc Pod.

Yeah.

Kick ass song, though.

Yeah, that's funny. Well, there you go. You got your five minutes there.

Yeah. But, yeah. All right, so that was. That's a good way to end that one. But ultimately, yeah, I'm excited. We're going to continue to document it. Anybody have any last minute words here?

No, it's just going to be exciting to show you the power of this state.

Yeah. I think you really want to understand there's a process and when you know what the process is, success. Because you don't have a process now, I can tell you.

And we're. And you know, we're going to be working the whole time while we're on tour. We'll be have, you know, fulfilling our, Our, our, you know, calls with our clients. Like, we're going to be very active. So you'll see all that as well. So you understand kind of what the process is and how we work with our, Our, Our, our clients as well, which is pretty cool. All right, well, keep, you know, we'll be back, you know, with more episodes in regards to leading up to the tour and then obviously ones the tour.

We'll see you then.

See you then.

Market, marketing.