Listen to Help
Creating the world’s first stream to donate campaigN
“I love it!”
Creative Director
Pablo Marques
Creative Team
Pepe Borrás, Anders Teigene
Creative Technologist Luke Kidney
Producer
Jeremy Gleeson
Agency
BBH London
Client
Sound Seekers
Audience
Music streaming platform users
Insight
Access to immunizations, medicines, and hearing aids can transform the lives of millions of children globally, 80 percent of whom reside in low- or middle-income countries
Campaign
“Hack” Spotify’s pay per stream royalty fee model to create the world’s first stream to donate campaign
Hearing loss affects over 1.5 billion people worldwide
Some cases are hereditary, but many more are the result of untreated infections and a lack of access to measles, meningitis, rubella, and mumps treatment and immunizations.
Access to immunizations, medicines, and hearing aids can transform the lives of millions of children globally, 80 percent of whom reside in low or middle-income countries.
To make our message heard, we partnered up with Sound Seekers, a British nonprofit dedicated to helping deaf and hearing impaired people in the developing world, to create a pioneering fundraising campaign.
Spotify compensates record labels through a pay per stream model. Every time you listen to a song, a small amount of money, the royalty fee, is set aside to reward the artist. So we “hacked” the system and turned it into a seamless stream to donate model.
How?
We created a 35 second voice track that described the campaign’s uniquely simple and innovative fundraising mechanism:
Thanks to the magic of the royalty fee system, Spotify users listening to our track generated an automatic donation in support of Sound Seekers.
We called it Listen to Help:
the world’s first stream to donate campaign on a music streaming platform.
We pioneered a way for music lovers to help prevent hearing loss in children by harnessing the literal healing power of music
Almost immediately following the release of Listen to Help, praise from Spotify employees began to flow in.
Even Daniel Ek, the CEO and founder of Spotify, tweeted his love for the campaign.
The media quickly picked up on the groundbreaking campaign, writing headlines such as, "Donate, without spending anything," and, "Listen to Help, or how to intelligently use Spotify to fundraise."
addendum
Listen to Help’s donate per stream model was later replicated by Edelman Deportivo in Sweden. All royalty fees received from Spotify users listening to Abba's 1979 single 'Chiquitita' were donated to UNICEF to support the rights of girls and young women as part of their Press Play to Give campaign.
