Built to be mobile first, the Beats Music digital music service reinvented the category by adding a level of human curation for the user. After consumers set up their profiles and set preferences, an editorial team fed the system with hand-selected playlists, albums, and songs. Additionally, a key app feature customized personalized music based on the user’s location, mood, or activity.
Objective and Context:
Streaming music services lack heart. Algorithms aren’t enough to fix the problem and deliver people the perfect music for the moment. To do to that, you need people driven by a passion for music. That’s what Jimmy Lovine and Trent Reznor wanted when designing a revolutionary new service combining human curation and technology, and creating a new way to experience music. And once it was built, it needed to be launched to a mass U.S. market.
Creative Strategy:
To create a product worthy of the Beats Brand that represents the next step of music’s evolution, communications expressed the humanity of this new service and brought the vision of the curation and technology to life. To highlight product attributes and connect with consumers, creative showed a user experience that felt warm and human while also being highly intuitive and easy to use.
Overall Campaign Execution:
Beats Music is a new company founded by the people behind Beats by Dre headphones. The brand is incredibly successful at creating electronics, but this was its first time developing a digital product.
The service was created from scratch and launched around the world. One agency handled everything from user experience and interface design to branding and a major above-the-line marketing campaign that included TV, outdoor, events, print, digital, and social.
The multichannel campaign launched Beats Music to the masses on multiple levels. TV spots during the Grammys and Super Bowl generated large-scale awareness. A partnership with the Ellen DeGeneres Show helped Beats connect to her audience. Performance advertising and SEO in digital drove millions of signups, and social, events, outdoor, and other partnerships helped drive momentum.
Mobile Execution:
Beats Music is a digital music service that reinvented the category. From the start, Beats Music was built to be mobile first. Mobile apps for iTunes and Android were developed as well as tablet versions. A desktop version was also created but it had limited functionality, as mobile is the central experience of the service.
There were three layers to the app. First, a smart profile is set up by users who tell it what genres and bands they like. An AI layer connects that profile with input from human curators, and an editorial team made up of music experts feeds the system with hand-selected playlists, albums, and songs.
The Sentence, a feature of the app, was a new way to create a personalized music stream based on a user’s situation and mood. Users filled out a Mad Libs-like sentence saying where they were, who they were with, and what they were doing, and after they selected a genre, Beats Music generated an endless radio stream that fit the users’ situation perfectly.
The Beats Music app became the No. 1 music app in iTunes on the first day of launch. Thousands of mentions in the press, millions of social media impressions, and incredible reviews in the music and tech press put Beats Music on its way to becoming the dominant player in the space.
The app provides intelligent recommendations and personalized music more successfully and consistently than any of its algorithm-only competition. Beats Music is all about the power of human curation to deliver the perfect music for the moment. Each execution either expresses that thought in a clear way (TV, outdoor) or actually does it by curating playlists that are extremely relevant to consumers wherever they are. The marketing also feels warm and human — a way of making Beats Music feel connected to culture.
