If possible I would love to put a bypass around the forthcoming winter. Lets be honest here Christmas is overrated. In January you will fail after 3 days to keep to an enforced health kick and only if you’re lucky February or March might involve a skiing holiday, but that’s pretty much it. So lets just shirk our way through it and start planning the warmer months in 2010. There is at least going to be a world cup, which will be brilliant as long as Wayne Rooney doesn’t fall over.
The 2010 festival season is what most summer lovers will be looking forward to and have already planned, Glastonbury 2010 has already sold out in a day. There is talk of ‘The Zep’ playing, or at least ‘Robert Plant minus the rest of the Zep’ but whatever lineup they choose, as it forms over the next few months we will all be hoping that Jay-Z doesn’t top the bill again. It just wasn’t in the spirit in my opinion, you may argue, but I don’t care because that’s actually the whole point of our latest project anyway.
At the beginning of this year we were looking at ways to engage users socially around Sony’s passion for sound quality. As music has never been more instantly available, the way in which it is discovered and shared has completely changed. But this ease of choice has come at a price with people lessening the importance of music quality (an MP3 is essentially a compressed file). We wanted to create a platform on which Sony’s passion for sound could be shared with a common passion of music. As a result we have just launched Sony’s Fantasy Festival, a free points based league game. The aim – to assemble the ultimate, imaginary festival line-up and gain as many points as possible through your acts’ popularity tracked on the internet. Your personal lineup becomes an expression of your personality but is also a way of proving you have your finger on the pulse.
A mixture of Yahoo data and Last.fm plays is turned into a buzz metric that we have guilefully entitled…Buzz! The better your Buzz, the more popular your festival. Last.fm was the perfect platform – the music fan base was already there with the added bonus of a database of more than 60,000 acts to choose from. It allowed us to make the line up visual and therefore a great deal more enticing.
Top tip – Rammstein are doing very well right now but you never know – Timmy Mallet might just have a giant fan base out there somewhere?! Who knows, but as we are running the campaign in over 32 countries you’re bound to find some obscure success somewhere. All I can say is have a go. The creator of the most popular line up will be going to a festival of their choice in a VIP Winnebago and a pocket full of cash courtesy of Sony. Even if it rains it’s better than a set of practice golf balls from your dad this Christmas.
