Case Study Project: Art Vinyl
Sector: Retail
Art Vinyl brings an innovative approach to displaying records as an art piece in frames whilst simultaneously functioning as an interior design concept. Within the music industry it has become renowned as an influential product that has contributed to the revival of vinyl records.
The solution had to allow users to rediscover information about artists seen through the eyes of other fans, friends or relatives that shared similar interests so that the frames could be used to also create digital artwork montages.
A key remit would be the need for a high level of interactivity.
What was needed:
- Creative tools to facilitate users in generating and discovering new art concept
- Localisation capabilities and tools to assist resellers in promoting products online
- Need to increase level of user generated content and interactivity
- More dynamic capabilities to create themed galleries and collections efficiently
What we did
The Content Management System (CMS) is used by Art Vinyl to generate themed galleries based on musical genres through assigned tags. Content rediscovery is then harnessed using Web 3.0 semantic technology web, which uses tags and genres to analyse specified machine-readable sites such as MusicBrainz and Amazon to retrieve semantic matches and harvest related music content about the artists.
To enforce the brand values the workflow allows an internal brand ambassador to moderate the content and check the correct material is grouped with the artist before release. Approving the content also generates thumbnails and previews, which fit dynamically into the frames. Once logged in live users can view the themes and interact with the frames using them as a source of inspiration to upload their own pictures. Saved user-generated content can also be viewed as part of the profile page.
However for real togetherness we also integrated with Google Maps to allow the user-generated content to aggregate as a montage of frames around the artist to create an artwork that was plotted on the map.
For further brand enforcement and to reduce the upload of any defamatory material and copyright breach, an appointed brand ambassador reviews the content before release. The brand ambassador also provides ratings for each of the work, which is pooled into a competition for selecting the frame design of the month.
Hovering over each users content revealed additional related frames and accompanying user information.
A core feature of the site is the competition that enables fans to design
The outcome
- Record sleeve art nostalgia of classic tunes posted by oldie fans have also appealed to younger consumers resulting in a surge of interest and request in the actual songs
- Competition in association with the BBC for the best art vinyl of 2008 resulted in (50,000 views) to the Art Vinvyl site?
- Triple pack sales increased by 26% as a result of the new marketing strategy