Sony Music/RCA Records UK act Bring Me The Horizon are using their fans’ Spotify listening data to shape the T-shirt design that they can then buy – all as part of the promotion for their amo album from January.
By going to a dedicated web page, they log in with their Spotify details and then pick their six favourite tracks from amo. The site will then analyse their actual listening history of those tracks – matching it against the “loudness and energy” of the tracks in question based on Echo Nest data – and then generate a bespoke T-shirt design for them. This project – called amo in colour – came out of Sony UK’s 4th Floor Creative division.
Given the importance of merchandise to metal and the subcultural currency in having a T-shirt that is outside the norm, this is a smart campaign that understands the world around the band and the kinds of things that will get fans fired up.
Acts have been able to sell related artist merchandise through Spotify for a number of years and BMTH’s profile on the DSP currently offers a long sleeve T-shirt, a normal T-shirt and a metallic gold vinyl version of the new album. The issue is that the merchandise items on Spotify are limited to three products and are rarely any different to what fans can buy on the act’s own D2C store, so actually using Spotify play data to generate something unique for each fan is one of the better examples of linking streaming and merchandise that we have seen in a while.
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