Sony Music

I 💖 Spotify.

So much so that I helped Sony Music France develop its brand identity on Spotify and other streaming platforms.

  • I conducted benchmark studies
  • Formulated strategic recommendations for digital channels
  • Recruited influencers
  • Put forward new product ideas
  • Diversified and designed internal and external brand content.

I still feel self-conscious DJ-ing at parties, but I use Filtr for that now.

Concept

Increasingly more people use playlists as a means of discovering new music. This is an opportunity for major labels to accompany consumers down this new path and push their own artists.

Filtr is Sony Music Entertainment’s international brand of playlists, followed by over 10 million music lovers around the globe. In France, they are freely available on Spotify, Deezer, Napster, Google Play, and Apple Music.

We wanted Filtr to become top of mind in the French music market.

Challenges & Goals

Establish a brand from scratch

Make users aware of our brand, create a relationship with a growing audience, create new listening habits

Build new internal processes

To succeed, we needed to make sure that the entire Sony community had our back. This meant focusing equally on internal and external communications.

Digital Strategy

I joined Sony Music France just a few months into the development of the local Filtr chapter.

I first focused my efforts on analyzing the product in order to devise a content strategy catering to diverse audiences and develop personas. Filtr prides itself in offering the most diverse range of playlists, catering to all genres or occasions.

We focused our early efforts on teenagers interested in our most popular playlists (Rap, Hits, Lounge, Indie Rock, Party).

Along with monthly competitive benchmarking reports, this informed our social media strategy.

Visual Content

I designed mini-games from scratch to boost engagement (‘Guess the song!’), used gifs, official artist pictures…I also designed paid content which became an important part of our social strategy.

Influencers

We teamed up with Sony’s best influencers : their artists, in order to promote the brand.

This included mentioning them on social media, boosting specific hashtags for special operations (#SindyxFiltr) and coordinating playlists takeovers to touch their fanbase.

Media partnerships

I designed client presentations for media partnerships.

We partnered with physical magazines, who promoted our content and created their own playlists.

We also established partnerships with niche bloggers to promote particular playlists.

This involved audience analysis, press relations, and led to playlists takeover boosting both our brand and theirs.

Live-tweeting

We live-tweeted at important musical events to reinforce our credibility as music experts, participated to music festivals and distributed swag to increase brand recognition.

Newsletters

In addition to a monthly external newsletter, I designed a monthly internal blast aiming to remind project managers to include Filtr in their own marketing strategies.

I focused on different platforms through the use of icons and colors, and custom coded it in HTML/CSS.

Innovation Challenge

In the Spring of 2015, Sony Music Entertainment held an international internal contest for their catalogue teams. The brief was to come up with innovative ways of promoting Sony tracks that were over 18 months old.

I put forward the idea of an “emoji” keyboard that we could develop, to make short musical excerpts available, so that users could incorporate them in their online conversations in all sorts of apps (Messenger, Whatsapp, Texts…).

My idea was selected internationally between 70 teams, to be developed further in London, along with 4 others. 

Unfortunately, it didn’t make it to the final round!