Sony Music

fanBase & soundBed

From collecting insights to sharing insights - we join the dots

What’s most exciting about our work for Sony Music is how the different parts connect, helping to create an insight eco-system that’s dynamic, agile and primed for the rapid pace of change that’s inherent in the music industry. Here’s introducing soundBed and fanBase.

The fanBase aspect of our work focuses on helping the Sony Music business to share audience understanding among key stakeholders and across diverse departments in compelling and friction-less ways. It’s a website (and supporting social media assets) created and managed by Crowd DNA, on which we capture the stories around Sony Music’s audience segments, editorialising them through words, pictures and video. The ambition is to keep the audience top of mind across all points of the planning and campaign execution process.

The insights that power fanBase come from a number of sources. One of them is soundBed – an online community of young influencers that we manage for Sony Music, enabling them to tap into fresh views and spirited opinions from an open-minded line up of recruits who get to hear unreleased tracks, check out new videos and report back on all that’s exciting in the world of music and attendant culture. We take the community offline, as well, staging workshop sessions and ethnographic work. Better still, key elements of soundBed’s content streams directly into fanBase.

Then there’s the special projects; the ad hoc pieces covering off particular needs. We’ve conducted innovation sessions for Sony Music’s Legacy department, exploring the appeal of new products (digital and physical). And initiatives sharing best practice learnings from other businesses on systems and cultures for disseminating insight.

There was our rip-roaring community of American Elvis fans who, aged from 18-75, had plenty to say on how to keep the music and reputation of the king in rude health. And – screeeam! – our One Direction community: 500 teens with circa one million opinions on how the next chapter of the story for the boy band of the minute should play out.

“We consider Crowd DNA as close partners. By taking time to listen and understand, they have fully immersed us in the lives of music fans. As a direct result, it’s inspired the business to develop ever more creative ways of connecting with our audiences.”

Federico Bolza, VP Marketing Services, Sony Music

  • Narrated Galleries

    We love films, but narrated galleries – fusing showreels of still images and audio of participant commentary – creates outputs that allow for high levels of reflection and audience empathy. Ideal for user experience work, in other words

  • Crowd Communities

    We’ve a wealth of experience at setting up and managing communities for clients, with learnings on how best to engage audiences and a full box of tricks for maximising what we get out of the work – including geo tagging, streaming in social media data and a mobile optimised platform

  • Pinterest

    We’ve used Pinterest to really good effect on a number of projects recently, helping us to explore differences and commonalities among different typologies in areas such as fashion and style, home, holidays and entertainment. Engagement levels with participants always rank high, and clients love the vividness and clarity of the findings.

  • Citizen Journalism

    Citizen journalism works on the principle of making reporters of our participants, briefing them to capture what’s happening in the lives of their friends and family via video dispatches and blogging. It gets us places where we can’t otherwise get. It bypasses the bias of having a researcher in attendance. People are often more accurate reporters on those around them than on themselves, so that’s another bias circumnavigated.

  • Network Audits

    If you want to really understand how people interact with those around them, it’s logical to research interconnected groups of friends, family and work colleagues. First developed as part of our award winning word of mouth research for Guardian News & Media, and since then refined and reconfigured across a range of global projects, our network audit approach helps us understand who’s influencing who as authentically as possible.