Fanify, a new music promotion app, has been launched in Ireland.

The team behind the creation of Fanify includes the CEO Pete Rust, a musician and recording engineer; Dagan Fleming, a producer and event production manager; and Shane Brett, a leading FinTech entrepreneur and founder of Gecko Governance – who is himself a musician.

Fleming and Rust run The Lockup, Dundalk. A cornerstone of the music scene in the northeast of Ireland consists of the Lockup Recording Studio and the associated label, Lockup Records. The founders are described as ‘leading Subject Matter Experts in all areas of music, marketing and emerging AI technology’.

“Shane, who is the lead investor in Fanify, has previously raised multiple rounds of Venture Capital funding, from some of the world’s leading investors, while successfully expanding many tech startups globally,” Pete Rust tells Hot Press. “His involvement has been very important.”

The nub of what Fanify offers is that it aims (a) to find and track Fans – the capital F indicating people who really engage with a band or artist’s content – and (b) to continue to re-engage them over time, solidifying the fan-artist relationship.

“Fanify was created as a solution to our own problems,” Dagan Fleming explains. “We are musicians, we are bands, we are DJs, we are artists, we are video producers, we are record labels and music promoters, so we understand the challenges faced by artists very well, first-hand.”

Artists, they point out, are in effect being forced by tech companies to work as digital marketing professionals, in the drive to push their own music.

“With the power of today’s technology, bands and artists should spend their time playing music and writing songs,” says Dagan. “Our class-leading technology, the ‘New Music Audience’, allows them to do just that. It uses AI-driven machine learning to show a band or artist’s content to the people most likely to love it.

“New Music Audience tracks fans and their engagement with the artist’s music. Fanify builds on that by continuing to show content to fans it discovers, so that they become fans for life. All of this happens automatically, allowing musicians and bands to spend their time on what’s important – playing music!”

The Fanify team is forecasting a massive shift in digital marketing across the global music industry.

“There is a lot of advice from music marketing professionals saying that any serious independent musician or band should be spending at least 20 hours a week on their music promotion and marketing,” Pete Rust observes.

“What they’re saying is that independent musicians should generally have a professional level of understanding of arcane marketing tools and techniques. Well, we reject this idea as antithetical to the advancements that have been made across the entire music technology sphere.

“The reality is that technology has revolutionised the music business. Everything is digitised and automated for bands and artists except for one key area: music promotion.

“The algorithms of the major video content platforms, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok are not looking for an audience for your video, they’re looking for videos for their audience,” he adds.

“Turning this on its head, Fanify’s ‘New Music Audience’ technology uses the vast marketing and data analytic infrastructure of Facebook and Google to find fans for a band or artist by showing their promotional content to people who love to discover new music – and who love the same type of music as theirs. Fanify automates the entire music promotion and long-term fanbase-building process.”

Pete Rust sees it as a win-win for artists.

“Instead of musicians having to spend hours trying to figure out how to use Facebook Business Manager or Google Adwords, Fanify will do it all, once they have signed up. They’ll be able to go back to playing music. To go back to creating their art.”

Which, of course, is what it is really all about...