Spotify Premium —
Artist Marketing

Art Direction, Graphic Design, Production

Following the success of the Spotify Premium MidYear and Holiday conversion campaigns, there was an initiative to see if leveraging recording artists in the creative executions would have an added increase on subscription performance. The performance team wanted to track user patterns from artist campaign signups and determine if it would also help increase streams, and through testing determine whether artists imagery performs better than generic creatives in social campaigns.

I was one of the designers tasked with developing this new visual system.

One initial concern was the quality of the photos we might receive from the recording labels. I needed to create a system that could showcase individual artists, bands with numerous members, images with either simple or complex backgrounds, and unite them in a way that would feel true to the individual artists while also feeling Spotify-branded. Taking cues from the recent Premium photoshoot, I developed a series of ambient overlays that incorporated the Premium duotone color palette. When appearing in a viewer's social feed, the final artist-focused deliverables would clearly be recognized as having being sent from Spotify, while also highlighting each artist’s unique style.

The initial channels included Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories and certain House Ads sizes.

The impact was immediate, and the campaign quickly expanded from running 6-8 artists at a time to over 30 artists a month, in over a dozen markets. We later introduced multiple creative variants for each artist, and provided vertical video deliverables where possible, to continue to build upon the success of the approach.

The Artist Social Boost program is now an ongoing monthly evergreen campaign, showcasing artists both large and small on a global scale.

Created at Spotify, 2017-2020.