Back in 2012, Columbia along with We Make Awesome Sh (now The Bot Platform) created an app for Calvin Harris’ 18 Months albums that utilised the iPhone’s accelerometer. Users could play the full album – but only on the condition that they kept moving their phone, with the music cutting out if they were resting.
Now another Sony label is using the same movement-based starting point to push the new Elle King album – but taking it in a slightly different direction. The RCA-signed singer has launched a new microsite that works differently on mobile than it does on desktop – but the end result is the same.
On mobile, users have to shake the device and a playlist built up of tracks with the same BPM will be generated on Spotify; whereas on desktop, users have to tap with their mouse on a metronome to get a playlist generated. The album, released on 19th October, is called Shake The Spirit (We don’t even need to write “see what they did there?” do we?)
Of course, users have to connect to Spotify to begin with – an action that automatically turns them into followers of her Spotify profile and her catalogue playlist. When first tapping the desktop version, sandbox got a measly bpm of just 37 but still got a playlist back featuring Hall & Oates, Funkadelic and Anne Peebles as well as (inevitably) several tracks from Elle King, including ‘Shame’ and ‘Good Thing Gone’ from the new album as well as a smattering of catalogue tracks. The second attempt saw sandbox surge to a heart-worrying 379bpm and, alongside Elle King, we got tracks from Bad Company, Three Dog Night and John Denver among others.
While it is obviously drawing on Spotify’s API, there is also an option to pre-add her new album on Apple Music for those non Spotify users.
It’s a fun little campaign element that tries to wrap the “artist-centric playlist + follow” strategy in new colours and, for the most part, succeeds. There is a consciously viral element to it and it would be interesting to see if this is just super-serving existing fans or actually draws in first-time listeners and converts them into fans.
