Guest Column: Building Long-Term Fandom Through Unconventional Music

In today’s age of music, where attention spans have dipped to less than two minutes per song, everything is built for instant gratification. You can’t have an intro longer than four bars. The chorus or hook has to kick in within seconds so the track can trend on short-form platforms, rack up streams, and hopefully help the artist barely break even. Somewhere in this race for virality, the true appreciation for art, emotion, and experience seems to have been lost.

That is probably why newer songs often have a shelf life of a few weeks, while classics continue to live on for decades. It is also why catalogue sales are valued far higher when they include legacy music rather than a barrage of recent hits that could become irrelevant in a few years. But that is not really the topic of today.

What fascinates me is how certain bands and artists build fandom by completely breaking the rules of conventional music and carving their own path. Obviously, there are far more failure stories than success stories with this approach, but the artists who crack this code build hyperfans who dedicate their lives to their favourite music.

One such band is Tool. A progressive metal band from Los Angeles with a cult following that defies all logic and reasoning. They were one of the few Grammy-winning bands that deliberately stayed off streaming platforms for years because they believed their music was meant to be consumed in a very specific way, through a medium laced with physical artwork, hidden meanings, and puzzles. Most of their albums are concept albums layered with symbolism that fans continue to decode even twenty years later.

They released 10,000 Days in 2006 and then disappeared for thirteen years without putting out a new album. In 2019, they returned with Fear Inoculum, an album that displaced Identity Taylor Swift, from the top of the Billboard charts. What makes that achievement even more unbelievable is how inaccessible the music is by modern standards.

The songs are over ten minutes long, heavy, dark, introspective, reflective, and technically complex. Yet none of that matters because they somehow manage to connect with listeners emotionally, even if those listeners are not musicians.

What is even more surprising is that the album had no viral moments attached to it. No dance challenges, no hook-step campaigns, no algorithm-friendly gimmicks, and barely any music videos. Yet it still went on to receive two Grammy nominations, winning Best Metal Performance for “7empest.”

During the thirteen-year gap between releases, Tool continued touring relentlessly, selling out 30,000-capacity arenas within minutes across the world. No matter which city they play in, they consistently pull 200 to 300 people for VIP experiences that cost upwards of 600 dollars.

That reveals something many current artists fail to understand. Building fandom is not about chasing viral moments or mass appeal. Breaking music is about cutting through the clutter to find your tribe. People who resonate with your thoughts and philosophies. People who identify their own journeys with yours. People who trust that the things you sing about are actually true.

That connection is far deeper than clicking a follow button, streaming a song for free, or spending five minutes watching someone on Instagram Live. A fan is investing space in their mind and heart for an artist. That is not something you earn through marketing hacks. It takes a lot for someone to identify with an artist strongly enough to wear their merch proudly as a stamp of belonging to that tribe.

Because it is never just about the music. It is about the ideology and culture surrounding it.

I say this because I am that rabid Tool fan. I have travelled to more than ten countries to watch them perform live. I have bought rare collectibles, merch, and every version of their albums that I could get my hands on. It is a connection that cannot really be explained, only felt. It defies every conventional rule of the modern music industry, and that is exactly where the beauty lies.

Somewhere along the way, I feel I have managed to achieve a small piece of that connection with my own band, Coshish, which shares a similar ethos. We released our first concept album through Universal Music in 2013 and sold more than 2,000 physical copies at a time when streaming was rapidly taking over.

In 2015, we released India’s first DVD merch box set and built a fan base that still streams our music to this day.

We have been working on our second album for years, but we refuse to put it out until it feels perfect. We do not want to feed algorithms, play the numbers game, or manufacture hook-step moments.

We choose to make art not for money, fame, or validation, but to communicate something we genuinely believe in and to find people who feel the same way. The goal is to move listeners emotionally enough to build a connection that lasts for years.

That is probably why, despite not releasing new music in over a decade, barely being active on Instagram, and never going viral, we still sold more than 200 tickets in Bangalore last week. The number may seem small in today’s metrics-driven world, but the connection is big.

And that, to me, is what unconventional music is really about.