Every time a song is played on streaming platforms like Spotify or Apple Music, the particular artist receives a royalty payment. We decided to use this mechanic to create an innovative, automatic donation system that would enable people to do good without much of an effort. But we knew it would be impossible to create songs that people would actually want to listen to all the time. So we decided to create soundscapes for different causes, which people could simply play in the background – whenever they wouldn’t really be actively listening to music. For example, while napping, working in the garden or doing chores. They could even play the tracks on repeat when they weren’t even at home. With every play a small donation was raised by doing absolutely nothing at all. Apart from streaming. And the best part: the donors wouldn’t even have to give any money themselves.

April 2017 we uploaded 11 albums to major streaming platforms such as Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Google Play under the artist name “HelpDirect”. Each album represents a different cause like health or animal welfare and features a different soundscape that uses thematically related sound elements (e.g. a heartbeat for health, chirping birds for animal welfare). A 12th album was pre-produced to be customized and released quickly in case of an unforeseen disaster. Each soundscape is based on one of the 12 tones of the chromatic scale, resulting in a perfect musical circle if all albums are played consecutively. Each album’s track titles together result in a copy to explain the idea. Tracks are 90 seconds to maximize the number of plays, which generates more donations – resulting in about 20 minutes of continuous soundscape per album. The albums are embedded on helpdirect.org & promoted on social media.

As an innovative donation system, HelpTracks created a competitive advantage for HelpDirect over other donation platforms. Thus, the initiative raised awareness for the brand and its supported social causes. It also solved various issues responsible for people not donating enough: having to make an effort to do so and the uncertainty of whether donated money actually went where needed to 100%. As a consequence, new donors were gained and donations were raised, however, the exact number of plays and donations generated remains yet unknown, as we have thus far not received the data from the cooperating streaming platforms. However, we are happy to deliver the results as soon as enough data has been collected.