To support Nothing But Thieves’ single ‘Amsterdam’ from their second album, ‘Broken Machine’, we ran a Spotify album pre-save campaign aiming to re-engage the fanbase and migrate them towards Spotify.

The campaign ran for four weeks leading up to the single launch. We started the campaign by sending 500 signed postcards to the band’s fans in the UK and around the world (cities included Amsterdam, Paris, Melbourne, Tokyo and Moscow). The postcards had a link to the Spotify pre-save page.

Based on the album creative (Kintsugi) and inspired by the periodic table, we coded the album title, leaving clues about it on the band’s official Spotify playlist. Every week, we updated the pre-save page and playlist with more clues about the album title and a new audio teaser at the top of the playlist.

Two weeks before the ‘Amsterdam’ release, we also launched an online typewriter game where fans had to guess the secret code to unlock an exclusive behind-the-scenes piece of code. The cipher code was hidden in the page source of the website and it received 14,000 visits in 24 hours, being the ninth-most-visited Sony UK site that week.

With the final Spotify teaser, we asked fans in Amsterdam to go to a secret location for “something special”. Within an hour, fans across the Netherlands started travelling to Amsterdam, many travelling 3+ hours by trains, buses and boats. The first 30 fans that arrived at the location in Amsterdam were escorted into the venue for an exclusive listen of the single and got tickets for the band’s gig in town.

As a result, we managed to re-engage the social fanbase across all channels as well as maximise the anticipation around the band’s return and their new album.