Welcome to Campaign Breakdown! We’re taking a deep dive into some recent artist campaigns – created by our independent artists alongside the team at Absolute, with little to no money spent – to analyse what works and how you can incorporate some new ideas into your next release.
The Beat Tape:
- edbl beats, vol.2 is edbl’s sophomore beat tape release. The first instalment released in 2020 was a collection of beats made whilst touring for Ady Suleiman. With vol.2 we looked to develop every area of the campaign from the previous – from marketing, promotion, content, merchandise, social activity, streaming strategy and beyond. We released this via edbl recordings (edbl’s own imprint) in partnership with College Music Records.
- Continuing the collaborative nature of the edbl project was crucial, and saw edbl link with his favourite upcoming artists in the Lofi/R&B/Neo-Soul scenes, including Mom Tudie, Conor Albert, Otis Ubaka, Mr Cutts, Amalie Bryde, Joe Bae & Stan Lodge. Collaborating with such a broad range of artists meant edbl was able to tap in to a variety of undiscovered audiences to join his growing fan base, as well as make the music as exciting and interesting as possible.
The Release Strategy:
- We tailored the rollout to suit streaming platforms. The beat tape is 19 tracks – we released it across x3 EPs, dropping one EP each week. At the same time as dropping each EP we also dropped a single product on the same day, with the feature artist as a primary artist to maximise reach on streaming platforms.
The Rollout:
- Once we dropped the full beat tape, we launched a limited/signed cassette which included a bonus track, to add a point of difference as most tracks were already out. Due to the success of the campaign, we are also planning to release additional formats of the beat tape in the future.
- At the start of the campaign we announced the #edblbeatschallenge, alongside a custom edbl Instagram filter. The challenge gave fans the chance to feature on edbl’s next mixtape release. They had to submit themselves playing over a track from the beat tape, using the hashtag and custom filter. We eventually put the best submissions to a fan vote which drew over 600 comments on the post.
- To keep momentum following the beat tape release, we ran a limited run of edbl beat T-shirts via Everpress – exclusively available for 3 weeks. These were designed by kwassa – who aside from having 30M catalogue streams, also designs for fast-rising London fashion brand Hundred Club.
- Quickly following this we announced the ‘edbl beat bowl’ sample pack on edbl’s Bandcamp. This is a collection of over 40 beats and loops made by edbl himself, used on edbl beats, vol.2.
- We worked with long-time edbl designer Oliver Jack to expand our previously running colour/graphic focused artwork design. With the beat tape we wanted to slowly introduce photographic elements into the artwork, putting edbl more front and centre. This design was expanded into animations which we used on Spotify Canvas, YouTube Official Audio Videos and social assets. We also gave each feature artist their own social assets with custom sound bed for their own social posts to maximise reach.
The Result:
Highlights to date include
- + 80k Spotify Monthly Listeners
- + 1.6k Spotify followers
- Over 500k Spotify streams and over 225k apple Music streams on the tape
- Spotify support: Mellow Beats (biggest playlist add to date, with 1.5M followers), New Music Friday UK, Jazz UK, dazed, Free Form
- Apple Music support: BEATstrumentals
- + 750 Instagram followers (20% increase)
- Radio support via BBC Introducing London
- Tastemaker support via College Music, Chillhop Music
