When approaching the Lewis Watson campaign, we knew that streaming was going to be fundamental to our success, and so we asked ourselves a question: how can we engage, utilise and maximise support from both fans and Spotify?

We identified our objectives: #1 Get fans to engage and stream key tracks on Spotify, as well as saving and sharing to help with any algorithmic playlists #2 Create an incentive for fans to share the tracks with their friends, family and peers #3 Develop a strategy that allows fans to engage with Spotify in an innovative and interesting way, hopefully helping to encourage support from the platform.

First we asked fans to create their own playlist of music, in which they had to include Lewis’s latest track release, ‘Little Light’ (later we would go on to include other new tracks). We built a custom website that featured the album cover for Lewis’s upcoming album, Midnight, the image was broken into pixels and when someone posted their playlist to Twitter with the #lewiswatsonmidnight, our API would pull in the playlist automatically and assign it to a random pixel. The great thing about this was that fans had to fully engage with the image in order to find their pixel and playlist, a process that they seemed to enjoy. Being able to explore other fans’ playlists created a sense of discovery amongst the community, while helping us to increase plays and saves.

Next we tackled the question of how we expand this beyond the dedicated fanbase, and we did this by offering the fans a chance to attend an exclusive Lewis performance. The playlists with the top follows were entered into a draw and then one person was selected as our winner. This meant fans were given the incentive to drive people towards their playlist which, in turn, helped spread the word and further reinforced our campaign goals.