We decided that we wanted to launch ‘I’m Aquarius’ differently to the norm. After some brainstorming we came up with the idea that the lead single would be made available for fans to listen first exclusively via The Night Sky app. With an existing fanbase of over 3m (650k in the UK, 1.5m in the US), the app is currently available on iOS or Android for £0.99 and frequently resides in the respective stores’ top 20. Not only intricately linked lyrically to the song itself, we found that The Night Sky is a beautiful and magical way of identifying the stars, planets, galaxies, constellations and even satellites above in the sky in an awe-inspiring visual manner. You can stand anywhere and hold your handset up to the sky and The Night Sky creates an enchanting replication, which displays the names of the stars, planets and other objects one can see in the sky. Even if your view happens to be obscured by clouds or daylight, the app will know which stars, planets, constellations are hiding from your view.

The rollout was that all users (new and existing) received an update that they needed to activate a week prior; then at 7pm on Monday 11th November users had to scan the sky, looking for the Aquarius constellation. Once found, they were able to stream the single by simply clicking the constellation itself, which then linked through to our iTunes album pre-order with an instant gratification of the single for iOS users and the Metronomy D2C store for Android. Aesthetically this was the perfect match for Metronomy – but in parallel it was a fantastic way to open ourselves up to a vast existing fanbase with zero expenditure, whilst giving media an angle to explore and write about that was far more interesting than your regular album announcement.