Case Study: Fred again..

Retrospective thoughts on NYC's growing pop-up culture

On June 17th 2025 I downloaded Twitch for the first time, not because I suddenly got extremely into live streamers but because Fred Again was hosting a secret pop-up in NYC and told us the ticket link would be given to us via Twitch.

For those who do not know Fred Again, he is a British singer, songwriter, DJ, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer. His style blends house, techno, and pop, and is known for its atmospheric textures and emotive vocals. Even if you do not know his name, you have probably heard his music through Reels, TikTok, or at a club. He currently has 13,183,724 monthly listeners on Spotify, with that number continuously growing.

His latest single, Victory Lap, with popular streamer and producer @Plaqueboymax and British rapper @Skepta took the internet by storm when they played a snippet on Plaque Boy Max’s live stream. The song features a sample from Doechii and everyone (me) was counting down the days till the full song dropped. Knowing the song had hype already, Fred decided to do a last-minute release party show in NYC.

I read somewhere that NYC is like the internet in real life. Both are comprised of a million little niches—a million lives and cultures and subcultures and communities, all overlapping and intersecting and bleeding into one another. Everyone can find somewhere to belong in New York, just as everyone can find somewhere to belong online. Fred again is far from niche, but the way thousands of NYC fans picked up on small clues, connected dots as a community, and actually figured out which venue he was playing at was extremely impressive. His pop-up concert sold out in 2 mins, leaving fans who could not score tickets disappointed (me!!!)

How did he create so much hype around such a ‘secret’ concert?

He started with breadcrumbs, not telling his fans where he was, just that he was performing tonight, and tickets will be sold very last minute.

He then leveraged Twitch, a platform he initially did not have many followers on, by announcing a stream at 4 pm EST. This went well with the song’s ethos as it first blew up due to Plaque Boy Max’s stream being clipped¹. The clip came from a longer stream where they were live mixing and producing music together.

Younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha are addicted to live streaming. According to Twitch, they have 35 million daily users, with 2.5 million people watching streams at any given point. At the release party stream’s peak, 35,000 people were watching him mix new music.

The stream was in an open studio looking over the city; it was just him, his team, a whiteboard, and his music set up. He did not talk much, but rather used the whiteboard to keep his fans updated.

Everyone on the stream was stressed, they knew tickets would be a blood bath cause people who live in NYC are now pop-up show assassins. What shocked everyone was that tickets would only go up when he reached the venue, but the stream edged everyone into believing we would get earlier access. My friend and I stayed on the stream for 3 hours, I haven’t even heard 3 hrs worth of Fred again music (I am a fake fan).

I could really feel the Sunk Cost Fallacy (our tendency to follow through with something that we’ve already invested heavily in be it time, money, effort, or emotional energy, even when giving up is clearly a better idea) come into play, 2 hours into the stream. I realised I had already sacrificed so much of my evening to getting these tickets, I may as well stay till the end. My friend stayed in the Ticket Master queue at position 8,000 when the max capacity of the event was 2,000 due to the idea of sunk costs.

What went wrong?

Fred Again really pissed off some of his loyal fans by arriving late to the stream, making people wait for 3 hours, only to post the link to his Instagram first. He also released tickets at 7pm for a 7:30pm show so by the time people reached the end of the Ticketmaster queue, the event was not selling any more tickets as it had already started.

Pop-ups are usually free events, but fans were extremely disappointed to see the $60 price tag on tickets they had spent their whole evening trying to get and only arrived halfway into the show due to poor planning.

Fred Again has a lot of employed fans, while it may seem like all of NYC just waits around for a cool pop-up, many of his fans with 9-5s were unhappy with the way they had to wait around for these announcements on a stream while being at work.

Secret shows serve a very different purpose from pop-up shows. Traditionally, a secret show gives back to loyal fans of an artist- it is a thank you to existing fans, but not a marketing tactic to get new ones. In the age of the internet and FOMO, secret shows can help make casual fans more hardcore in retrospect, but if the aim is to market something new, then a pop-up show is a better option.

Pop-up shows are about fastest finger-first, last-minute tickets and location drops, but the artist cannot expect casual fans to wait around on a stream for hours, knowing the capacity of the location is far too limited for the demand. This show lacked clarity on whether it was a secret show or a pop-up and who they wanted to fill the limited seats at the Brooklyn Paramount²

For a rising artist like Fred again, all this backlash blew over pretty quickly, and while OG fans may still have a sour taste in their mouth, the idea was one of the first at this scale. Execution errors aside, this is going to serve as a blueprint for future pop-ups and secret shows.

I love the new song and while sitting on Twitch for hours pissed me off I now have more Fred again music on my playlists than I did before so at the end of the day he definately achieved what he set out to do with this show.

1. Clip that went viral:

2. Popular concert venue in Downtown Brooklyn known to be more intimate. This was where the pop-up was held