NEW YORK (CelebrityAccess) – Bonsai, a platform that helps recording artists engage and monetize their superfans, has taken a novel approach to scale – bringing fans and artists together “where they’re at.” Today, the company is announcing recent integrations with Discord, YouTube, and Instagram, allowing fans to directly interact with their favorite artists from the places they already spend time online.
The company’s core feature allows artists to invite fans to participate in what the team calls “async AMA’s.” Fans use Bonsai to ask questions such as, “What inspired that verse?” or, “What can we expect from your upcoming album?” An artist records an audio response to the fan, which gets paired with visual generative art to form a bonsai that gets delivered to the fan via text, email, and now Discord, Instagram, and YouTube.
In October, the company launched distribution hooks across Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts – each time an artist records a bonsai in response to a fan question, the Bonsai gets auto-posted across these platforms, tagging both the artist and the participating fan. These integrations allow both collaborators share the content.
The Discord integration – the Bonsai Discord bot – has empowered artists, like sister-indie pop duo, Neoni, to invite their superfans within their Discord server to ask them questions via Bonsai but without ever leaving the platform.
For a member of a Discord server, asking a question on Bonsai is as simple as typing “/bonsai”. After the artist answers a fan’s question, their one-of-a-kind Bonsai gets published right back into the artist’s server, stimulating fans to interact with and share the content. And, thanks to the aforementioned distribution hooks, artists have been able to leverage bonsais as a way to attract more fans to their Discord community.
The Bonsai team, with close ties to YouTube, also became inspired by artist and creator fandom on the platform and, more specifically, the comment sections of YouTube videos. According to the team, comment sections on long-form YouTube content are “graveyards for fan engagement.” Thus, they took that problem and cooked up a solution – a feature that turns comments into intimate fan interactions. For a fan on YouTube, asking a question on Bonsai is as simple as writing a comment under a YouTube video (e.g. music video, podcast episode). Once the artist answers the fan question with a bonsai, it auto-publishes to YouTube shorts, replying to and tagging the fan directly in the original comment thread.
Miami-based Latin recording artist, Isra, has already been using this new feature to increase fan engagement for his podcast, 99%, stimulating excitement among his highest-value listeners and growing comments across his podcast channel by over 36%.
“Meeting fans and artists where they are already hanging out online is the name of the game for us,” says Patrick Sullivan, Bonsai Co-Founder. “What Bonsai really is, at the end of the day, is a connective tissue for fans and artists to create moments together. In a world full of constant noise and inflated followings, we want to bring fresh air to the fan experience.”
