Spotify Case Study – Grey Alchemy | Digital Marketing Agency Bangkok %

The Challenge

Spotify, the world’s leading music streaming service, approached us with a dual-pronged campaign with 2 different objectives:

Promote the highly-anticipated debut EP from K-Pop heartthrobs TXT
Drive streams to their Spotify Early Noise playlist celebrating the EP release

With only a few weeks to spare before the EP launch, we set out to position Spotify as the K-Pop music streaming platform of choice, building on existing fan excitement.

Our Approach

Understanding our audience

We began by closely studying the K-Pop fan community in order to understand who they are and how best we could engage with them.

As a global cultural phenomenon, K-Pop has developed a particularly fervent fanbase in APAC. Asian K-Pop listeners are avid social media users who follow all their favorite artists and share their passion for the genre across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and particularly Twitter. Their extreme dedication and loyalty to their favorite groups see them scouring the Internet for the latest bit of news, gossip or photography.

TXT’s imminent EP launch had the K-Pop community buzzing. Fans were eager to find out more details about the members — who were still shrouded in secrecy at this stage — and, most importantly, to hear their voices.

The scarcity of content available prior to release is an industry gimmick that was smartly orchestrated by TXT’s record label Big Hit Entertainment. However, to set Spotify apart from all the other streaming platforms, we decided to offer our target audiences what they were most interested in: exclusive and original content.

Content Strategy

Phase 1:Launch

To entice listeners to stream TXT’s EP on Spotify, we decided to enhance the Early Noise playlist with exclusive audio content from the band members themselves. Fun and light-hearted questions were sent to Big Hit Entertainment for each of the five members to answer. Their responses were then included in between songs on the Early Noise playlist, for an extra-special listening experience that was exclusive to Spotify. Since the release would be available on multiple streaming platforms, this extra content would give the Early Noise playlist an edge, setting Spotify apart from its competitors.

Phase 2: Engage

In the initial launch phase, we chose to focus on Spotify’s Early Noise playlist. Beyond Phase 1, during the second half of the campaign, our objective was to grow TXT’s profile across the target regions. We decided to further the interactivity between Spotify and its target audiences by inviting social media users to take part in a quiz.

To foster the relationship between TXT and its growing fandom, we built a Twitter Chatbot that allowed users to answer questions about each of the band members.

The advanced setup required us to design a chat with multiple prompts and re-entry points, from the initial message inviting the user to choose 1 of the 5 members, to a set of 3 questions per member, each with multiple possible answers, to providing the option to start the quiz again with a new member. Once we built the entire chatbot, we then duplicated and localized it for the different markets in their native languages.

We wanted to make sure the chatbot was very appealing to K-pop enthusiasts. To ensure we got their attention, we asked the TXT members to create their own individual playlists with their favorite songs on the TXT Spotify artist page.