To draw his K-pop fan army onto the new OpenWav app, pop singer Kevin Woo schooled his nearly 4.4 million social-media followers on how it works. Then he sold stuff to them: $10,000 worth of hoodies and water bottles and $1,200 worth of tickets to a Los Angeles listening party in March for his single “Deja Vu.”
“It’s very refreshing,” says Woo, formerly of hit boy band U-KISS. “It gives me so much freedom to do what I want and not have to stress about ‘Where am I going to get my next paycheck? How do I know when the label’s going to pay me out?’”
OpenWav, co-created by tech entrepreneur Jaeson Ma, who co-founded influential label 88rising and was an early investor in what became TikTok, launches Wednesday (June 11) with a splashy Indie Music Week party in New York attended by Ma and artist/OpenWav executive Wyclef Jean. It’s one of many platforms designed to help indie artists reach their most devoted followers and participate in a superfan market that Goldman Sachs predicted could reach $4 billion over the next five years. The app joins a crowded market that includes SoundCloud’s “fan-powered royalty” system and a long-promised Warner Music Group (WMG) app that launched a test version starring Ed Sheeran in April.
Ma’s invention, which has drawn $30 million from investors such as WMG and CAA’s Connect Ventures, has an all-in-one smartphone interface that allows artists to stream new songs and videos, sell tickets and quickly design (through the use of AI tools), sell and ship merch. Ma spent two years setting up an international network of 200 factories that accommodate orders of any size. “I can put my design on a premium hoodie that’s like Yeezy off-white level, and if one fan buys that hoodie, we will make it and ship it to their doorstep directly — with zero inventory,” Ma says. “It’s pretty crazy what we’ve been able to do.”
“I call this the Gen-Z Sears catalog,” Ma says on a Zoom as he scrolls through the custom golf balls, water bottles and other products available through the app. “I don’t want to say we’re faster than Amazon or Alibaba — we’re not faster. We’ve built a similar supply-chain ecosystem and made it specifically to be on-demand for artists and creators.”
In a music business where few artists can make a living from streaming revenue alone, and must tour, sell merch and develop sizable loyal fanbases to buy their products, “superfan” has become a gold-rush buzzword. (OpenWav fits this category even though Ma avoids using the term “superfan app.”) In March, Australian producer Alan Walker launched an app designed to interact more directly with fans than he could on Instagram or TikTok; Boston metal band Ice Nine Kills’ app, Psychos Only, offers exclusive merch and exclusive ticket pre-sales with a $7 monthly membership fee.
“This started out several years ago with Patreon, and we learned that for premium content, fans will pay if you create something valuable,” says Dan Tsurif, vp of digital marketing for 10th Street Entertainment, Ice Nine Kills’ management company.
Ma’s bet for OpenWav is that dedicated fans will pay $10 a month — “a Starbucks coffee,” he says — and 1,000 of them will provide each participating artist with $120,000 in annual salary. But some in the music business wonder whether such artist-to-fan tools will be relevant for a broad range of artists. K-pop stars like Woo benefit from a loyal fanbase built meticulously over years of savvy music-company marketing, and veteran touring stars from Taylor Swift to Umphrey’s McGee have spent decades building fanbases on the road, but everyone else may struggle on this kind of app.
“In K-pop, they’re already obsessive about collecting things and buying merch. With a touring artist, they’re used to buying VIP [tickets] or merch,” says Aidan Schechter, a partner at management and publishing company 1916 Enterprises and founder/CEO of management music-tools venture Patchbay. “I don’t think artists and artist teams are able to keep up with the demands of consistent posting and exclusive content creation on a lot of these apps. Artists and their teams don’t have enough stamina.”
For Woo, 33, who came up in the South Korean K-pop industry, OpenWav is a crucial tool for remaining independent. The app, which he has been beta-testing most of this year, pays 80% of merch and ticket sales to the artist and keeps 20%. Woo says OpenWav allows him access to all his sales data and analytics — he has used it, for example, to discern that he has a surprisingly large listener base in Austin, Texas, leading him to a recent South by Southwest showcase.
“I’ve been in a K-pop boy band for over a decade, and knowing how the whole system worked, I wanted to start my own venture,” he says. “As I started to learn more about the app, I fell in love with how easy and seamless it was. It’s like TikTok meets Spotify.”
