We have heard of “follow to unlock” campaigns many times, but never “smash to unlock”. No doubt inspired by tales of rock band excess in the 1970s where hotel suites were detonated and defenestrated, Kesha is encouraging fans to wreck her room.
It is, of course, not a real room (that would be hugely impractical and highly expensive). For the Blessed Mess game (tag line: “You can’t get to heaven without raising a little hell darlin’”), fans connect to their Spotify account, smash things up (by using their mouse to point at things in the room, throw objects at them and then get rewarded with exclusive content as the song ‘Tonight’ plays in the background).
The content includes images as well as short videos from Kesha. When Music Ally played, we managed to smash up 40% of things, so we got some videos including one of Kesha telling us, “Bitch, you are blessed,” and another featuring seven seconds of the title track of her High Road album.
Before you fully connect the website to your Spotify account, a message from Sony Music Entertainment says that by agreeing to the terms, it will be able to do lots of things with your details. These include viewing your Spotify account data (including email address, your public playlists, what you have recently played, what music is saved in your Library and your top artists). It will also be able to control Spotify on your devices, change the picture on your profile, add or remove items from your Library, manage who you follow on Spotify and create/edit/ follow public and private playlists. (It can, of course, be removed by going into your account settings.)
After we played the game, we found that we had her Blessed Mess and Best of Kesha playlists automatically added to our library and we were also following her official account. We understand the importance of data capture and building follower numbers, but the T&Cs above seem somewhat heavy handed. We are left wondering if listeners regard getting access to the game as worth handing over so much of their account to an act and their label.
