James Bassett

Madeon

Columbia Records needed help to promote Adventure, the debut album from French electronic music producer Madeon. Our audience insight and previous work with Madeon told us that his fans are passionate and tech savvy, with many of them dabbling in music production themselves.

With a budget of just £10,000, our challenge was to create buzz around the upcoming album launch by delivering something novel and cutting edge that would allow fans to engage with Madeon's music. So we decided to turn Adventure into a live mash-up concept where fans could mix their way through the album on any device. We called it the Adventure Machine.

Due to their expertise with audio APIs, we partnered with We Make Awesome Shit. Together, we used the new HTML5 WebAudio API to let users create perfectly timed loops and compositions, encouraging them to hear, explore and share Adventure in an audio-centric and playful way wherever and whenever they want.

And, as an added bonus, we were able to use the brand new, experimental WebMIDI API for Chrome (and the JazzSoft MIDI plugin for other browsers) to allow fans to control the website and create mixes using Novation Launchpads.

Within 48 hours of launch, it had received more than 160,000 visits with an average dwell time of 4 minutes 55 seconds. A week later, we added new samples to give fans a reason to come back and continue to share their mixes.

In the first week, more than 320,000 people created mixes, 7.5 million samples were played, with 10% of users opting to share their work on Twitter and Facebook. Although driving sales directly wasn’t a primary objective, 10% of users clicked through to purchase or stream the album.

The site climbed to the front page of Reddit and was hailed a success by Beatport, The Fader and Music Radar. Music industry journal Music Ally described the Adventure Machine as a chance for "making a marvellous racket online".

In 2016, the Adventure Machine was featured at Google's I/O conference as a best in class example of Web Audio.