You’d have to be living under a rock to not know the name Sam Feldt. From collaborations with Demi Lovato to tours around the world, to tracks with ten of millions of streams attached to him, he found his sound long ago and expanded it in all the right ways to become a star. Some of his most popular tracks include single ‘Post Malone’, and ‘Way Back Home’, which have become cultural staples in the new digital music era the world has moved into.
Always ambitious to take projects to the next level, Sam Feldt has partnered up with successful business man Nick Velten to rebuild a fan-first platform for artists titled Fangage. The app and dashboard makes it easy to cultivate healthy, meaningful relationships from the artist to the fans, with features including mass email, data collection, and follow-to-unlock content. The one-stop-shop is something Sam Feldt is putting his full weight behind, which says a lot about the growth and direction of the application.
For readers that are unaware, what is Fangage, and what does it set to achieve?
Fangage provides creators and brands with their own fully-branded fan engagement and monetization platform. This way, they can liberate themselves and their fans from the social media platforms and algorithms they are stuck in.
How did the idea of pursuing Fangage come about between you and Nick Velten?
Back in 2016, I founded Fangage out of personal frustration when I found out I had more than 1 million followers but reached only 2% of them when I posted something. If I wanted to reach all my own fans, I had to pay Facebook and Instagram hundreds of euros in ads and post boosts – ridiculous! With Fangage, creators and brands can take back control of their fans and monetize their following easily.
What does an average day look like for you between Heartfeldt, Fangage, and Sam Feldt? How do you manage your time, and what will you do when touring starts going again?
To be honest, it all comes down to working with great people you can trust and rely on. Which gives me the freedom to focus on the big picture and the creative stuff. For Heartfeldt and Sam Feldt, my core tasks are making music, A&R-ing for the label, and playing shows. The rest is handled perfectly by management which gives me a lot of freedom and focus. With Fangage, I am mainly involved as Chief Creative Officer, and the operations are handled by the team. Coming up with great ideas to improve the platform and providing valuable input from a creator standpoint is where I add the most value. When touring starts up again, I’ll be most likely be doing fewer shows. I envision spending the weekdays between Heartfeldt and Fangage and playing shows on the weekends.
What differentiates Fangage from a platform like ToneDen.io, Feature.FM and other marketing dashboards aimed at the ‘EDM’ market?
While other platforms provide tools that allow artists to grow their profile, Fangage delivers an all-in-one solution for fan engagement & monetization. We offer artists their own website with built-in growth, marketing, and monetization tools. On top of that, the platform and its data are owned by the artist, not Fangage. This way, we allow artists to liberate themselves from the socials they are stuck on and build truly independent careers.
What features, in particular, would you say most appeal to electronic music fans?
For upcoming artists, our follow-to-unlock feature is excellent to help grow their Spotify or social media profiles. In addition, they love the fact that they are getting a fantastic website straight out of the box for a fraction of the cost. Looking at our more established acts, they benefit more from having direct access to their Superfans, for example, to sell more tickets to live events. They also make great use of our monetization features that allow them to sell content & memberships to fans directly.
How will Fangage’s partnership with SoundCloud be a point of benefit for electronic artists looking for a competitive advantage?
We envision integrating with SoundCloud will allow Fangage artists to share private audio uploads with fans more easily. In the future, they can easily link their two accounts together and have direct access to their (private) song library from their Fangage dashboard. This way, they can sell early access to songs or force fans to follow them to listen to them. At the same time, they are collecting fan data, which they could easily use to promote new music, content, or events in the future.
Have you pondered incorporating cryptocurrency/NFTs into Fangage in the future?
Definitely, we are actually in talks with Rally.io right now to integrate their services into Fangage. This is on the roadmap for the end of the year. I’m a big believer in crypto and NFT’s and have also done my first drop a while back. Linking Fangage with a decentralized ecosystem will give artists even more freedom, which is very much in line with our vision.
Now back to Sam Feldt! It seems your label Heartfeldt is going well. How has it been, being behind the scenes of a label?
I love it. I’ve always really liked exploring SoundCloud and Spotify to find new exciting artists. Now, I finally have a home for them. With more than 50 releases on the label so far, we have established a great Heartfeldt Family of artists, and every song we drop is bigger than the last. We’ve recently also launched Heartfeldt Publishing in collaboration with CTM to offer upcoming artists a home for their music and their songwriting.
Has there been any contact with Post Malone’s team after releasing your hit release ‘Post Malone’?
Still not a word. I genuinely hope he likes the track!
You’ve been putting out hit after hit the past couple of years. What can we expect from Sam Feldt music-wise in the latter half of 2021?
I’m working on more than 20 songs right now, so you can expect quite a few singles to drop in the rest of the year. I’m also slowly building towards an album, so exciting times ahead!
Be sure to visit Fangage and explore all it entail, or even sign up as an artist!
