Spotify is a purely digital brand, essential in the lives of music fans and totally ubiquitous across all devices. As prominent as they are, the Spotify brand is oddly ethereal, especially in the minds of industry professionals, who have few touchpoints to interact with the brand in a meaningful way once their music is uploaded onto the platform. It was a unique challenge to bring Spotify to the real world and create a tactile experience for guests.

When Spotify created Spotify for Artists, it sought to empower creators, allowing them to easily upload, monetize and receive data on their music. Their latest creator innovation is Canvas, enabling artists to attach short-form videos to each of their songs, reinvigorating the lost medium of album artwork. Spotify wanted to make the US launch of Canvas a much buzzed-about industry event. Plus, we needed to catch the attention of industry professionals, a group that suffers from networking burnout, often opting out of PR-driven events.

Our guest list was an invite-only selection of high profile members of the recording industry, including managers, reviewers, and artists themselves—a group that has been to innumerable nondescript cocktail mixers. Our idea was to immerse them in a space that evoked a local record store, giving our event a unique environment of authenticity; a simple “we know music” quality. The record store concept also allowed us to fill the space with physical touchpoints, helping make Canvas immediate, tactile, and undeniable. We decided to fill “Canvas Records” with custom record sleeves, each featuring a screen in the middle, playing real Canvases from the Spotify platform on a loop. The physical object would be intriguing enough to engage guests, while special, scannable codes on the back would link the physical experience to the digital platform.

Canvas unites artwork with music—the marriage that originally created the album cover as an iconic medium. Unfortunately, the streaming age has slowly crushed album covers into smaller and smaller squares on real-estate-starved screens. Strategically, it made sense to celebrate Canvas as the reinvention of the album cover, while still paying tribute to music’s roots as a physical medium. The Canvas Records sleeves were the perfect marriage of new and old, static and motion. Designed to reignite the love that we had for music when we first discovered it, before the advent of digital.

We designed a record store from scratch, gutting an existing building and crafting custom, minimalist furniture in an arrangement designed to subconsciously move guests through the space as new pieces of design caught their eyes. Our shelves were full of custom-designed record “sleeves”, each with a built-in screen playing an actual Canvas video or animation from the Spotify platform. Each sleeve’s housing featured a bespoke piece of graphic design, surrounding the screen with a wax-coated paper stock that evoked a classic 12-inch LP sleeve. The final product was a flowing, tactile browsing experience--shelves upon shelves of battery-powered records that could be picked up, handled, moved, and stacked. We complimented the record shelves with hundreds of posters and flyers, each inspired by a different genre of music.

We saw an industry-wide expansion in awareness and curiosity about Canvas as a medium. We also saw multiple uses of our custom event hashtag, and the crossover of the hashtag from the Industry side (the majority of our guest list) to the consumer side.