On his last album, 2016’s The Colour In Anything, electronica artist James Blake was one of the first acts to test out Spotify’s then-boxfresh superfan marketing features for new music. It was a surprise release album and his top listeners were emailed the day before the album was available with a link to listen to three tracks from the album before anyone else.
For his latest album, Assume Form (which was released in January), he is back working with Spotify again. Together they created a short documentary about the album that first appeared on the streaming service. Initially only accessible via Spotify, the documentary appeared the following week on YouTube.
The self-explanatory James Blake’s Assume Form: A Short Film runs for just four and-a-half minutes and has footage of him playing the album title track on piano and then talking about the making of the record – with sprinklings of arty shots throughout.
Interestingly, the documentary is listed in the YouTube playlist for the Assume Form album on his channel, but when you click on it, it opens on Spotify’s own official YouTube channel. From there is a link to listen to the full album on, you guessed it, Spotify. The video also ends with the Spotify logo in white on a black background, leaving you in no doubt who was bankrolling and pushing this. It has, however, only had just over 27,000 views within a few weeks of being uploaded to YouTube. Perhaps the bulk of plays happened as soon as it went live on Spotify – but there is no play count for videos like this on the music service so there is no way to measure its impact.
One is left with the presumption that this was simply not pushed as hard as perhaps it could have been. Spotify has over half a million subscribers on its YouTube channel and Blake has 6.9m monthly listeners on Spotify. Either this was a very soft launch and a quiet testing of the waters with new features (which is fine); or else there is a massive disconnect between followers on an audio service and their willingness to watch video content on there (which is less than fine).
