On Spotify, music labels receive royalties for the amount of times songs are played. So we asked ourselves: What if we replaced a music label with a nonprofit? And so the Listen to Help project was born.
The idea of turning a medium for listeners into a medium to help those who can’t hear seemed very powerful to us, so partnered up with Sound Seekers UK, a nonprofit dedicated to helping deaf and hearing impaired people in the developing world.
We created a 35 second audio track that described the campaign’s uniquely simple fundraising mechanic:
Just by listening to the track, the royalty fees generated automatically turned into a donation for Sound Seekers!
Almost instantly after it went live, we started receiving emails from Spotify staffers who reached out just share with us how cool they thought the Listen to Help project was. Even Daniel Ek, Spotify’s CEO and Founder tweeted to congratulate us. Blogs and media also picked up the campaign, using headlines such as “Donate, without spending anything“, “Listen to Help, or how to intelligently use Spotify to fundraise” and “Even the interns are good in BBH“.
In late 2014, the Swedish agency replicated the Listen to Help campaign for their client, UNICEF. The agency set up a website, Press Play to Give, allowing users to play Abba’s 1979 hit ‘Chiquitita.’ All the royalty fee’s collected were donated to the support of the rights of girls and young women.
The result? Listen to Help turned a medium for listeners into a medium to help support those who can’t hear, creating the world’s first global fundraising campaign on Spotify.
Credits
Client: Sound Seekers
Agency: Pepe Borrás+BBH London
Creative Team: Pepe Borrás, Anders Teigene, Pablo Marques.
Creative Technologist: Luke Kidney
Producer: Jeremy Gleeson
