For the release of London Grammar’s debut album we teamed up with The Creative Corporation to give fans an interactive way to preview the band’s album online ahead of its official release. We wanted to make it feel like more of an event for fans and give them access to unseen content, so we set out to build a custom microsite to achieve this.

Using the SoundCloud API, we built our own player to host the album stream on the band’s website via a microsite. The microsite also displayed a mix of images from the album artwork as well as pictures taken by the band while recording the album, lyrics from each track, links to the band’s social network sites, Facebook and Twitter comments and links to pre-order the album (digital, CD and vinyl).

In order to access the stream, fans were asked to apply for tickets and book a time to stream the album by using their email address and either their Twitter or Facebook account with the option to share the event with their friends for added engagement. The stream was available worldwide, so we set up four listening sessions a day that were four hours long each to make sure fans around the world were able to login at a convenient local time. The splash page went live a few days before the stream was available, with a countdown and registration form, in addition to being shared on the band’s networks to allow fans to apply for tickets and be the first to listen to the album.

We saw great online engagement from fans worldwide during the week of the stream that not only saw the word of mouth continue to build on the band, but also increased their social network numbers and album pre-orders.