236,288 listeners played in a week.
12,181 reached an ending (a commitment of at least 12 minutes).
18,244 people clicked through to Amazon to purchase.
An Interactive Novel on Spotify
While conducting research for Hurts we discovered that their audience are abandoning radio in favour of listening to music on Spotify. Our challenge was to reach this audience there and make them aware of Hurts and their forthcoming debut album.
We looked at Spotify in it’s simplest terms, as a platform for searching and listening to audio clips, and came up with an idea to create an interactive audio novel using the service's search function to navigate.
The story was written by up and coming Manchester author Joe Stretch, and narrated by actress Anna Friel. The novel is written in the second person (like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books), and each of it's 87 chapters have been published as individual products on Spotify, using specially coded artist names so the chapters don't show up in a typical search.
After listening to each chapter, Anna offers the player a choice of what to do next, along with a unique code for each action. Typing this code into the Spotify search field brings up the next chunk of the story. Throughout the experience players hear extracts from "Happiness". If they make it to one of the story's eleven possible endings without dying, they are rewarded with an exclusive track preview.
236,288
listeners in the week before album release.
236,288 listeners played in a week.
12,181 reached an ending (a commitment of at least 12 minutes).
18,244 people clicked through to Amazon to purchase.
Cannes Lions 2011 - Cyber Lion - Bronze