https://fourmoresongs.lewiswatsonmusic.com

To encourage pre-orders of Lewis Watson’s 4th EP, Alex Burford came up with a very clever concept: use pre-order numbers to unlock the stream of a song, piece by piece. Rather than unlocking the song in sequential order, the campaign would reveal snippets from different parts of the track.

The idea was solid but the execution would be a challenge. I spent a lot of time exploring playback options to mute the track programatically but eventually settled on a more robust and secure solution. I divided the song into 99 equal parts with the 100th clip a little bit longer to account for fading. Then, starting at 100, I muted the relevant clip and worked my way down to the first clip that only contained 1% of the song.

I saved all the snippets as private tracks on Soundcloud so I could access them through the Javascript SDK. I stored the list of secret links in a MySQL database to easily access each of them according to the progress of the campaign.

Kate Brighouse designed the campaign page along with a sketched waveform that suited the style better than the standard waveform. I split that image up to match the audio snippets: 99 equal parts and one slightly longer one at the end.

Using the same back-end system I developed for The Wild campaign, we are able to import daily iTunes reports. The total figures are stored in a MySQL table and referenced to update the campaign page.

When the page loads it calculates the progress of the campaign and reveals the appropriate amount of music. I used jQuery to animate the reveal process and contextualise why parts of the track are muted.

Due to the long silences, the player needed more interactivity. Using the Soundcloud SDK and soundmanager2 I wrote custom jQuery to track the song’s current time and move a progress bar accordingly. I also added an event listener so that clicking on the waveform would jump to that part of the song.

The campaign launched when ‘Four More Songs’ went up for pre-order and helped to instantly push the EP into the iTunes charts. As the campaign continued Lewis would regularly remind his fans of their progress in unlocking the track. The entire song was finally unlocked during the week before release.