A week ahead of the release of third album, We Move, James Vincent McMorrow invited his fans to take part in an interactive location-based album pre-stream.
During the week leading up to the album release on 2nd September, fans were able to visit selected record stores globally to stream the album. Geo-fencing technology meant fans had to be in the designated record store listening locations to access the album stream though a webpage on their mobile device.
To tie in with the album concept, James encouraged his fans to move to different locations around the world, including cities where the album was written, to enjoy an exclusive first listen of the record. Fans were able to visit over 60 hand-picked record stores worldwide to listen across Europe, North America, and Australia.
We Move was written in constant transition. McMorrow decamped to Los Angeles in late-2014 for six particularly fish-out-of-water months, where the new songs began to crystallise. He then recorded between Toronto, his home city of Dublin and London over the course of roughly the next year. The album’s backbone was formed in each of these places by a few key producers that McMorrow met during his travels. The result is an album about movement – geographically, mentally and emotionally. This is what formed the concept behind the We Move Album unlock campaign and the locations that were picked.
The campaign was designed and built by development company We Make Awesome Sh, who worked alongside the UK digital marketing team at Believe Digital to launch the project.
Following the concept of the album, the campaign got fans “moving” in order to listen to the record. It saw high engagement across multiple cities, mainly London and Toronto, and was extremely well received online, being applauded by fans for its unique and creative initiative.
Record stores taking part promoted the campaign across their social channels and hosted Official Listening Location poster in-store.
The campaign ran for a week, over which time pre-orders of the album gradually increased. The campaign was able to bridge the worlds of online and offline, creating dedicated listening spots using geo-fencing technology, something that’s generally untapped in music marketing.
The design, UX and webpages built by We Make Awesome Sh were clean, user-friendly and engaging. We feel the campaign engaged and rewarded James Vincent McMorrow’s super fans, and was a great story to create leading into album release.
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