Music Marketing

New “Shoppable” Music Videos Could Provide Sales Boost For Artists & Labels

Screen shot 2012-04-05 at 11.44.33 PMTaking interactive e-commerce to the next level, Montreal-based online clothing retailer SSENSE has debuted a unique music video where viewers can actually make purchases of the products shown on screen – in real time – while watching. While this was certainly a unique approach to providing SSENSE shoppers with contextual buy offers, it can also be applied to musicians as a way to sell more merchandise items direct-to-fan.


Featuring Australian rapper Iggy Azalea, hip-hop duo FKi and Grammy-nominated producer Diplo, the video for “I Think She Ready” was styled entirely by SSENSE. In doing so, viewers can shop Iggy's, FKi's and Diplo's looks using interactive hotspot technology from wireWAX, making every item featured in the video available for purchase directly through the video.

While there’s nothing entirely unique about how the video is shot (very standard pop / hip-hop elements throughout), it isn’t until the white “S” icons begin appearing all over the place that the viewers are pulled in. These “S” icons expand into the words “SHOP THIS LOOK” once the viewer scrolls over it. Once clicked, the video pauses and then displays a page where all the clothing items worn in the video can be purchased.

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Personally, I found that the floating “S” icons were bit too distracting – especially if one were to revisit the video repeatedly. It also seems to place the emphasis mainly on the shopping experience (albeit unique), and not so much on the artistic vision behind the video. But then again, when you’re using pop figures to sell fashion, it might be safe to say that “art” takes a back seat to “commerce” in this particular instance.

Musicians should at least take note of this concept, as it can be a great way to entice fans with unique and interactive calls-to-action, which can ultimately increase their bottom line. 

Watch the video and share your thoughts below:

This post is by regular Hypebot contributor and independent music business professional & musicianHisham Dahud (@HishamDahud)

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7 Comments

  1. The $ boxes made me want to click “Next”….Why don’t you just put a link at the end of the video that takes the viewer to a store page with all of the items for sale from the video??

  2. Great potential for cause-related call to action music videos ie. artists raising money for a cause they care about.

  3. The comment about commerce over art could not be more on the money. I also agree with J Bryan Dill above. While the interactivity of the video is clever, the experience of linking the viewer to shopping content is quite distracting. Maybe better if it was used more sparingly than every second frame…

  4. Yeah it is distracting but no one has thought about how time-consuming this would be to set up! Maybe useful for big international artists, but for the average artist this would never make a profit…
    And I dont think its the first video doing this. Is basically just small annotations, and that have been done before…

  5. For what it’s worth, I noticed you can select the tags to be on, off or when your mouse is close to a tag… can select from the top of the player…. in the middle.

  6. Hmmm… this is definitely not the first music video with interactive “shop this look” technology. The folks over at Diesel did an interesting campaign a couple years ago where consumers could submit themselves for a chance to take part in the creation of a music video.
    Diesel then picked a handful of folks, flew them to the shoot, dressed them in Diesel gear and shot a music video. The end result was pretty engaging and had social media (notice that myspace was still relevant) and “shop this look” hooks throughout.
    You can check it out here (though I am guessing the clothes are no longer available…): http://www.diesel.com/ahundredlovers/

  7. Cinsay also allows users to create shoppable videos (minus the “S” tags that many of you don’t like AND minus any crazy, complicated time-consuming set up on the back-end. It’s as simple as capturing video with a smartphone and uploading it into our app!). Check us out: http://www.mycinsay.com/ Better yet, check out hip-hop artists, The Bodega Brovas–they’re using Cinsay right now to promote their American Graffiti tour and sell products: http://bodegabrovas.com/

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