Marketing campaign of the month: Steve Angello – Human

In only a matter of weeks, Swedish House Mafia unleashed their reunion set at UMF Miami, and one of their members, Steve Angello, dropped a brilliant album filled with works from the past years. With 21 tracks, it certainly makes for some great listening whilst you’re grinding away at a marketing campaign. But in this article, we’re going to talk about a marketing feature of this campaign that really stood out. That is the “Lifetime Pass” of access to all of Steve’s shows… for life.
The basic idea of this pass is that fans have to pre-save his album on Spotify in order to be entered into a draw of some sort if they wish to be eligible for a lifetime supply of tickets to his solo shows. Of course, some people may perceive this as a simple gesture of love towards all of his fans as a thank you for their continued support over the years. However, if you look under the covers, this idea is absolutely genius.

By gaining loads of Pre-Saves on Spotify (which he will), Steve Angello will essentially trick the Spotify algorithm to push the entire album to more people via Discover Weekly & Release Radar – thus gaining him more streams. And obviously, everyone who saves will be listening on repeat. As a driving source of revenue, this genius idea to incentivize fans into pre-saving the track is exactly the type of mentality that more producers within the industry need to develop. After all, nobody really pays attention these days when you see a social media update saying “listen to my song”. Instead, Angello’s marketing team was able to incentivize his fanbase into a call to action so that the song would gain a lot of traction.

But also coinciding with the Swedish House Mafia reunion set, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. With a lot of hype around the trio still rampant throughout the EDM scene, it gives the marketing of the album a big boost. After all, a lot of the tracks already have several million plays to their name. Pretty impressive. Encompassing raw emotion with beautiful electronic music, Steve Angello has once again shown us that EDM simply knows no boundaries.

It is worth noting that this “Lifetime Pass” is simply one item in a growing trend of fan incentives for EDM lovers. For example, Live Nation recently launched their “passport” that allows entry into EDC, Lollapalooza, and many more events for a one-time fee of $999 USD. Not bad!

So what can we learn from this well-executed marketing campaign? As mentioned numerous times throughout the article, audience engagement and incentives are key to success if you wish to “hack the algorithm”. Therefore, offer your audience a reward for saving/sharing your new song. This may include things like free tickets, a Q&A session, a 1-1 Skype session etc. Basically, you want to put yourself in their shoes, and ask yourself what your audience would want in exchange for undergoing a Call To Action. Simple!