Five artists made their interpretation of Linnea Henriksson’s upcoming single, ‘Cecilia’, before the original version was released. Participating artists were The Royal Concept, Marlene, John De Sohn, Petra Marklund and Invader Ace. The five different interpretations of the song were released on Spotify using the artists’ own social media channels to announce it.
The message to fans was that the artists were honoured to have been invited to interpret a song from one of their favorite (although secret) artists. Fans were encouraged to follow a playlist called Cecilia to be able to hear more versions of the song from other artists – and, with time, learn who had created the original song.
In-client advertising was used to highlight the fact that there was something going on and encouraged people to follow the playlist to find out more.
When Linnea released her original version of the song, all contributing artists wrote about it in their own social media channels, linking to the playlist.
‘Cecilia’ was the first track released as part of an album pre-stream for Linnea Henriksson’s new album, Du Söker Bråk, Jag Kräver Dans.
All fans that had followed the playlist during the first phase of the campaign would now be notified every time a track from the new album was added to the playlist.
When the pre-stream was complete, Linnea launched a competition where she encouraged fans to make their own version of her upcoming single. She made the stems and the chords available on her website and people were able to find inspiration from the versions that the five different artists had done previously. Fifty different versions were submitted and the winner was announced on a Spotify Live Session with Linnea.
l The playlist reached 450k streams
l Streaming of Linnea’s back catalogue increased 50%
l 15th place on the Spotify album list
l 20th place on the official album chart in Sweden, only counting streams
l Listeners increased 75%
l Linnea built a close relationship to her fans due to the campaign
l The posts from step one reached 1m people
l Sweden’s biggest morning show interviewed Linnea about the campaign
l Sweden’s popular TV show Allsång på Skansen interviewed Linnea and invited one of the competition entrants (a school class of 10 year olds) to perform with her
l The biggest news sites in Sweden wrote about the album and campaign
KEY LEARNINGS
The campaign proved to be really effective to build awareness before an album release and to create a buzz. We took away a lot of learnings and new ways of creating hype using social media platforms – and we also learned a lot in how to utilise all parts of the Spotify client, including how to use Linnea’s Spotify profile as a social media platform. It was instructing to see how we could work with an artist brand building associated with release and how to let the fans be part of a release in an innovative way, allowing them to participate in shaping the release.
Project Budget
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