We ran a Behind The Campaign focus on US pop punk band Waterparks back in May 2018 around their second album, looking at how they had experimented with Amazon Marketing Services and approached D2C segmentation in interesting new ways.

To promote their fourth album, Greatest Hits (not actually a greatest hits compilation, FYI), they have created a browser-based 2D game that links to Spotify or Apple Music. That means gamers can play along to tracks from the new album and they all count as full plays.

The game itself is quite simple. Choosing to play as one of the three band members, you have to cycle through various scenarios and collect points (keys, smiley faces etc.) and avoid dangers (angry clouds, someone in a car shooting lasers etc.). You are racing against time and have to collect 17 different items that all relate to tracks on the album as quickly as possible.

The design of the game also references the promo videos for ‘Lowkey As Hell,’ ‘Snow Globe’ and ‘Numb’. It was developed by 300 (the band’s label), MDDN (the band’s management company) and UK creative agency F That.

Gamers compete to make it onto the top 10 leaderboard. According to F That, it had 60,000 plays in its first 48 hours and 1,400 new gamers managed to complete it.

The intention, of course, is to drive streams as users grapple with the game – the idea being that they have to re-play levels until they get the hang of the very rudimentary cursor key controls. As users have to log into Spotify or Apple Music, there is data collection for most players, although you can also choose to play it with no music in the background.

None of this is reinventing the wheel, but it’s a fun mechanic that helps drive up streams of tracks from the album. (The tracks keep playing, even if you get killed or run out of time, thereby ensuring the tracks cross the 30-second threshold to count as a play on each of the DSPs.)