Augmented Reality is now accessible to everyone. Is the music industry ready to take advantage of it?

Watching movies in the last decade has cemented the novelty and utility mixed reality can offer. The first time I say Tony Stark talk to Jarvis while visualizing the entire controls of his robotic super suit in the first Iron Man movie was not just exciting, but also educational, as it introduced a whole new legion of people to the potential of what mixed reality can offer.

Augmented reality (AR) is one such form of mixed reality. It’s the modification of your real world, super imposed by computer generated objects. What’s really fascinating is how you can use this concept to revitalize and enhance the information you can share from regular physical objects. With Augmented Reality, you can potentially embed every single physical objects with more contextual information to guide the person viewing the object further along their journey. AR has gone mainstream over the last few years, especially now that Apple and Google smartphones come equipped with ARKit and ARCore capabilities respectively, which allow developers to easily build AR apps. Worldwide spending on augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) is forecast to achieve a five-year annual growth rate of 71.6% over the 2017–2022 forecast period, according to IDC.

While we have seen companies invest in the novelty of this concept with Pokemon Go and SnapChat face filters, augmented reality can offer a host of lucrative untapped business opportunities for musicians. The possibilities are endless, and artists who are taking advantage of this new wave of immersive technology are already seeing rewards. Here’s a few ways musicians and labels can use AR to enhance the relationship with their fans, drive viral demand and generate revenue.

Enhance your live shows

The obvious place to start is live shows. Live shows are all about feeling connected with the artist, and immersing the fan in the story, the emotions and the tears the artist conveys. If fans are already on their phones capturing these experiences, why not enhance this with augmented reality?

Think contextually creating visually captivating experiences for the listener based on what’s happening on stage. Eminem did just that with his AR app, launched to support the 2018 Monster tour, allowing fans to consume his live show in an entirely new way.

Of course, not all artists have the budgets to do such extensive experience projects. But there’s simple and easy ways to use AR to enhance live shows while still having money to pay your bills. AR-embedded posters at live shows are taking off, where artists and their marketing team embed posters around the venue with AR content to creatively drive fans towards streaming more of the artist’s songs or purchasing merchandise at the shows.

In this example above, we worked on a simple experience for JID’s creative team to drive fans towards his Spotify music track. This can be done on a shoestring budget, as all this entails is having a video and the music link the artist wants to promote.

Incentivizing fans to purchase artist merchandise

Music artists make the majority of their money through merchandising. Touring artists make anywhere between 10–35% of their revenue through selling merch.

Augmented reality can help incentivize fans to purchase this merchandize by launching exclusive, direct to fan content that can only be triggered through the merchandize design, thus incentivizing fans to purchase the item. We’ve seen artists like the late Nipsey Hustle do this with his smartstore app for his Marathon Clothing brand, allowing customers to experience exclusive behind the scenes footage of his music embedded in the clothing’s design.

Apps like Immerge AR allow artists to seamlessly manage their AR content embedded merchandise, allowing them to upload the image targets and the exclusive videos that their target fans can unlock.

Another big mainstream example is the promotion of the Michael Jackson’s Scream album. The creative team of the King of Pop’s estate partnered with Sony Music and Shazam to have the stunning album artwork coming to life with an electrifying animation to the background track, ‘Leave Me Alone’. This partnership marks the first global AR promotion of its kind for Shazam or for a Michael Jackson album.

Generating viral demand with experiential marketing campaigns

NGData defines experiential marketing as an advertisement strategy to immerse consumers with interesting engagement strategies to help them experience he product or service’s value as much as possible. Experiential marketing is huge in the 21st century, especially when targeting millennials. According to Eventbrite’s 2017 research report, 3/4 millennials would rather spend money on experiences over material objects.

AR allows artists to truly immerse their fans in their music, and this opens the possibilities of endless creative experiential campaigns. Take indie artist Beatie Wolfe for example, who released the world’s first live 360˚ AR stream which “combined live, 360˚ stereoscopic video and real-time AR visuals to create a modern, Fantasia-like live streamed album experience.”

Vinyl is also making a big comeback, and bundling the album with a visually captivating and contextual immersive experience that triggers based on the song the fan listens to can make for a great marketing campaign. Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam did just this, allowing listeners of their vinyl to unlock “psychedelic AR sculptures that accompany the soulful, ’70s vibe of each song.

The challenges

While all of the above are creative and immersive ways to use AR to better connect the artists’ content and the fan, there are still open questions music labels and music marketing teams need to think through. Some of them include —

• What is the ROI for these campaigns, and is the spend justified?
• Does the funnel for the fan to find and download a good AR scanning app have too many steps involved?
• Finding the right agency with music business know-how and in-house technical expertise to model the 3D objects and string them together to create amazing experience?

But there are many influencers in the space, who can help guide businesses to use forward facing tech to generate the right demand for the music their artists create. As more investment is made into the space, the future is bright for the AR space, and only time will tell if the music industry can take advantage of its potential.

I write about technology and its practical applications to solve real business and human needs. Find and connect with me on Twitter! I always love to hear interesting and diverse opinions.