On 25th September, we held a virtual album release party for our global priority developing artist Ava Max, in a first-of-its-kind partnership with gaming platform Roblox. It was initiated by the WMG global marketing team and pulled together in an awesome team effort between global marketing, APG, business development, legal, Atlantic Records and Ava’s management team.

The event was rebroadcasted on 26th September for fans in European and APAC time zones. The event was set in a custom virtual world (built by Roblox specialists Melon Development), designed around the Heaven & Hell album visuals, where users could complete quests, collect items and purchase virtual merch while listening to music from the album. At the end of a countdown timer, players could watch Ava perform two tracks from her album and answer fan questions on a big virtual screen. Ava’s Roblox avatar came into the crowd at the end to socialise with the fans.

Press pick-up before the event included Variety, The Verge, and VentureBeat. We promoted the event with banners within Roblox, visible to every user on the platform for 24 hours before the event. Roblox also supported the event with in-app notifications and we arranged social posts from Roblox and Ava Max.

We feel this activation was a perfect alignment of audiences, with Roblox userbase fitting Ava’s young target audience perfectly and the market distribution of Roblox matching Ava’s popularity around the world.