How Vianney gathered 146,000+ pre-registered fans to launch his new tour

When Vianney announced his return to the stage after 4 years away, the attention was immediate. His team relied on Billy to capture that interest before ticket sales opened, in order to maximise sales further down the line. On sale day, a base of fans ready to buy was already waiting.

Billy is the first ticketing platform designed for artists, their labels and promoters. Identify your most engaged fans, build your D2C strategies and grow your audience with every launch.

1. Why pre-registration changes everything

Between a tour announcement and the ticket on-sale, your fans share, comment and wait. That energy fades fast: with no capture point, all of that signal dissolves into a feed.

Pre-registration exists for exactly that. A fan leaves their email and city on a dedicated page, well before the on-sale. On sale day, they get a notification and priority access. The benefits are direct:

You don't lose the attention peak. The announcement creates a spike of emotion; pre-registration turns it into immediate action.
You offer a real privilege. Pre-registered fans get the best seats before the general public: pit, front rows, golden circle — the ones that sell out in minutes.
You measure demand, city by city. The number of pre-registrations draws a map of demand before a single ticket is sold. You know which dates to double, which ones will require real promotional work, and where to focus your marketing budget.
You size your waiting room. Knowing your pre-registration volume means knowing the load peak you'll have to absorb. For Vianney, it hit 54,000 requests per minute, handled with no service interruption.
You keep a reusable audience that you can activate again on the next tour, and you can measure your real conversion once sales are open.

2. The strategy, step by step

Announce and open pre-registration at the same time. Announcing and then opening capture three days later means missing the peak. The page must be live the second the fan hears the news.
Relay it with a single link. One post that stays on the profile, one or two stories driving traffic to the artist's site. No intermediate redirect, no friction.
Only ask for what's useful. Every extra field drops your completion rate, so every question has to justify itself (see below).
On the day, notify your pre-registered fans (email + push) with priority access before the public on-sale, and back it up with a post across all your social channels. The on-sale reminder matters as much as the announcement.
Analyse at D+2. Compare pre-registered emails with buyers' emails. That conversion rate tells you which cities converted and which ones still hold demand to reactivate. Non-converters are an immediate re-targeting audience.

Optional: open on distributors 2 to 3 days after the fan presale. You stretch the campaign and reach their audiences, once your own fans have been served first.

Which data to collect

Email: the foundation of the direct relationship, and the key to cross-referencing pre-registrations and buyers.
City of interest: the most structuring one. It gives you the demand map and targets your campaigns.
Preferred ticket category and date, optional: a purchase intent captured before the on-sale, useful for calibrating quotas.

Everything else (age, favourite social network…) costs more in completion than it brings back in targeting.

Two rules decide the rest. Tempo: a few days between each step, one to two weeks for the full sequence. Spread over a month, a campaign loses the fans it had captured along the way. The journey: an experience in your own colours, from the first click to the ticket, in three clicks and with no forced account creation. The fan stays inside the artist's universe, and that continuity is reassuring at the moment of payment.

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3. Music blind test: turning the wait into a fan experience

A pre-registration is still a form. Vianney turned it into a moment of play with a music blind test: a clip plays, you have to recognise the track as fast as possible, and points are calculated to the millisecond. At stake: a chance to access ticketing several hours before everyone else.

The fan spends time with the music instead of filling in a field.
The score ranks your audience. Recognising a track in three seconds or in fifteen isn't the same level of fandom. You know who to reserve a gift, a bundle or a separate access for.
A score is shareable. While waiting, the fan has something to post and share with friends. A great way to create word of mouth and organic reach!

One rule: the blind test is an experience, not a disguised form. The data useful for sales is collected at step 3; the game plays only on sound and score.

4. Billy x CRM: the data that belongs to you

On most marketplaces, fan data belongs to the platform. You sell without knowing to whom, and those platforms then use it to promote competing events or artists to your audience and your own fans.

With Billy, pre-registration, presale and the blind test all feed your database, exportable and syncable with your CRM. You no longer start from a list of anonymous emails, but from an audience segmented by city and by intent, that you reactivate with every project.

5. Billy x Vianney: results that speak

This strategy is nothing theoretical — it's exactly what Billy equips artists, labels and promoters to do. Vianney launched a 45-date tour across Zéniths and Arenas on a site entirely in his own colours, with his handwriting, his music throughout the journey, and a music blind test built into the pre-registration to engage his fans while collecting their data.

The result: 146,000 tickets requested before the general on-sale, a peak of 54,000 requests per minute on sale day absorbed with no service interruption, and a qualified fan base built before the first ticket was sold. → The Vianney case study

Conclusion

Pre-registration isn't a waiting form: it's the moment when the emotion of an announcement becomes a measurable, convertible audience. Never let anticipation fade between the announcement and the sale. Open capture from the very first second, orchestrate your actions over one to two weeks, and keep the data!