More than just their names starting with the same four letters, electronic act Disclosure have been deeply involved with Discord for a long time. For their third album, Energy, in 2020, they went heavy on the gaming angle, the heartland of Discord, and used their own Discord channel as a key platform in the album’s marketing.
It has close to 10k members and a large number of sub-topics such as Blockchain Crew (covering crypto and NFTs), Production Chat (with threads around music theory, hardware and plugins) and Music/Creators (where users promote their own music and solicit feedback for their demos). It is a nice meeting point for those interested in new technologies more generally and those creating their own electronic music.
As part of the push for Energy last year, Discord was the designated destination for a remix competition was well as collaborative songwriting efforts, all linked via the #BeHoward hashtag (named after Howard Lawrence, one of the two brothers making up the group).
The band handpicked their favourite remixes (all of which were uploaded to SoundCloud by their creators) in 16 different groupings of five remixes (or sometimes six if there was a tie). A final six were also highlighted in the Winners Circle. As part of a drive to grow their Twitch presence, only those who are subscribers to their Twitch channel can enter competitions.
Given how many entries there were in each category, that shows real commitment from the group to listen through so many entries and then shortlist close to 100 of them on their Discord channel.
They have also run a number of different #market-mondays competitions for both audio entries and artwork entries, harnessing the creativity of their audience on Discord.
Rather than this being something that is treated as a holding pen for occasional pieces of competition-led marketing, the group themselves are putting the work in to nurture the Discord community and to find ways to reward engagement.
This is an all or nothing platform and Disclosure are one of the textbook examples of how to do it properly and do it well.
