Beats Antique Take Their Fans On A Hero’s Journey

Beats Antique's recent release, "A Thousand Faces – Act 1," draws on the work of Joseph Campbell and the concept of the hero's journey. Lee Martin built on that work to create a campaign for fans to take their own hero's journey and to share what they learn along the way. The result is a nice extension of the music and related artwork into a participative project that connects the band and their fans more deeply while drawing in others who might be enticed by their approach.

Lee Martin is helping Beats Antique take their fans on a hero's journey with some inspiration from Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" and the Monomyth.

Beats Antique's "A Thousand Faces – Act One" draws on this work by Campbell to inspiration and organization with "Act Two" to follow.

So Martin created a web-based journaling adventure that then inspires and structures creative writing by Beats Antique fans.

As Lee Martin notes his campaigns tend to be interactive but he wanted to go beyond tweets and comments to encourage "sharing personal stories in a meaningful way." He used a "three part strategy":

1. Involvement

"It’s very important to show users how others have already become involved because participation breeds more participation. We’ve done this by providing a prominent listing of the latest entries and by getting our writers to share their work socially. The band also contributed their own journal entries to get things started."

2. Inspiration

"Sometimes it helps to lead in creativity, and we’ve done this by providing a prompt to each phase of the journey directly to the user, beginning with the open-ended query: 'What’s Your Story?'"

3. Incentive

"Meaningful prizing also helps maximize contributions without forfitting quality. The band chose to reward all fans who complete their Journal entries with a free download of the upcoming Act 2, and a chance to see the band on tour."

Martin discusses some more technical details including a mention of the Omniauth multi-authentication login system and the creation of a journal for fans to tell their stories.

These elements work quite well as I found myself quickly entering the site, checking out what people had written and jotting down a few words quite smoothly. Easy onboarding is so important yet clearly not fully understood or widely applied.

All in all a nice effort of creating a campaign that builds on an album and related artwork in a truly integrated manner.

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Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (Twitter/Facebook) is relaunching All World Dance. To suggest topics about music tech, DIY music biz or music marketing for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.