#BobMarley75: Re-imagining Music Catalog Marketing With Web 360
Howdy, readers. Shep here. 🧙🏻♂️
For Bob Marley's 75th Birthday Anniversary I wanted to contribute my creativity to the celebration of this man's incredible legacy.
The result is Marley World – a 360° music catalog experience for old fans and new fans alike.
This experience was previously live as a website at marley.world, but can now be explored via the viewer window below.
If you want a deeper explanation of what goes into a concept like this, you can watch the video below.
I offer some insight into the UI/UX of the project and explain the potential impact it can have in terms of activating music catalogs for new listeners in creative ways.
This concept comes alive as a new exploration of how I see the future of music marketing – interactive, experiential, and contextual.
After completing my unofficial 360° Mac Demarco celebration for Here Comes The Cowboy, I had an epiphany.
I had just created a fresh interactive way to activate someone's catalog of music with added context for the user/fan.
That Mac Demarco concept sparked something in my mind, and I found myself thinking how an immersive catalog would look for legendary bands like The Beatles, Queen, and Van Halen. Then I thought about artists like Jay-Z, Drake, and Kendrick Lamar.
Each of these artists is a legend in their own right with a massive catalog of music.
However, the modern interface of music streaming doesn't always make it easy to dig into these deep catalogs.
With Bob Marley's 75th Birthday Anniversary, I realized there was an opportunity to help people dive into his legendary catalog of albums with more context than they can find anywhere else.
At this point, many of us rely on exploring an artist's top tracks on Spotify/Apple Music/Whatever, or tuning into curated playlists featuring that artist's material.
I feel like in many ways this is the new "square one" when a fan finds an artist for the first time.
The difficulty here is that most of these curated playlists don't have any context for the listener outside of track titles, album titles, and the year the album was released.
So it's pretty easy to see WHEN an album came out... but you can't learn WHY an album came out.
This kind of web experience brings together the context that is missing in most streaming platforms for specific projects.
For example: a new fan who finds Bob Marley on Amazon Music's REDISCOVER Bob Marley playlist can read a bit about the legend, but what's next?
There isn't a clear next step in the journey to reliably turn new fans into superfans.
I see this kind of web experience as a missing step that brings the legacy of a legend into the future of fandom: a self-contained Bob Marley universe with the full discography available to be explored and (maybe more importantly) understood within the larger context of the artist's career.
Hope you enjoy this creation.
I'm looking forward to building more of these concepts for legendary bands and advancing the idea of what's possible in music marketing.
Cheers.
Your pal, Shep Bryan
