Spotify

Our client

We were approached by a global PR company (one of the top names in this sector worldwide) to assist on a bespoke animation they had conceived for their client, Spotify.

The brief was simple: to create a short animation which spoke, in simple terms, about Spotify’s upcoming high court case against their largest competitor, Apple Music. This case concerned what Spotify saw as anti-competitive behaviour by Apple Music, online and in the App Store.

The public was not aware of this high-profile court case and Spotify felt that public opinion would be strongly in their favour if it was known, as they are a company who champion new artists, aiming to treat each one with respect and pay them fairly.

Our preparation

In this case, the PR company had already designed a storyboard and characters. They had done this using the Spotify brand guidelines and also taken inspiration from another app, Headspace.

Our animation team were tasked with working alongside other highly-skilled animators to create whole segments of this video. The timeline was particularly tight, with the court case due to take place two weeks after production began. We worked on-site because this project was deemed particularly volatile, and was therefore top secret until its release.

Our strategy in motion

The need for the highest-quality results in a prohibitively short turnaround time meant that the main challenge was interpersonal communication. We overcame this by holding informal morning and afternoon peer review sessions each day over the course of this intense project.

The standard of animators working on this project was particularly high so these peer-led sessions proved to be very successful. The team came together and leant their individual experience to each sequence to the benefit of the overall output.

Our shared results

Our end-client, Spotify, were overjoyed with the film, saying that it was above and beyond what they had been expecting. The animation itself is now available on YouTube and has had over 25 thousand views since it’s launch.

Many articles have been published in relevant trade publications and online regarding the role this video played in turning the tide of public opinion in favour of Spotify, whose court case was ruled to be lawful in the EU High court after a vote of 5-4.