The album reveal – both the tracklisting and the artwork – is a tried and tested way to get fans primed and to drive D2C pre-orders as well as DSP pre-saves/pre-adds. 

There have been a variety of ways this equation of “reveal + call to action x fan excitement” has been deployed in the recent past, all of which means that having a new angle on a marketing failsafe is imperative. 

For the 19th February release of Times, UK electropop artist SG Lewis’s debut album, the set up was done by creating an AR filter for Instagram that had all the track titles contained within it. 

Opening the filter revealed a glitter ball hanging from the top of the screen and by moving your phone around it would show different song titles hanging in the air. Tapping on any of the titles played a short extract from the song in question, giving users a flavour of the album. 

The twist here was that this was the only place that previews of the tracks could be heard before the album itself was released. The idea behind it was to allow fans to start to explore the album artwork and concept before they heard the full thing. 

On the day of release, Lewis also held a geo-gated live event with tickets costing £15 (or $20.50 in the US) each, where he performed the album and held an aftershow Q&A for fans who had bought tickets for the VIP experience. The sets were at 7.45pm GMT and then later at 8pm ET (and again at 8pm PT) for US viewers. 

“I’m going to be doing a little DJ set, playing a bunch of new songs off the album before it gets released on Friday and just generally having a hang out,” he said ahead of the stream. 

It marks a gear shift by TikTok to move deeper into livestreaming as the Valentine’s Day event by Justin Bieber (also covered this issue) illustrates.