The Voice Lab at Warner Music Group
A new way for music fans to engage with artists the world over.
- ClientWarner Music Group
- StudioAI Experience
- Location New York
The AI Experience studio has supported the creation and operation of The Voice Lab, an organization within Warner Music Group, in their mission to:
- Educate labels and marketing teams about voice as a powerful channel to engage fans and increase music streams;
- Normalize Conversational AI inclusion in broader campaigns and as between-cycle promotions;
- Identify and leverage new opportunities in the channel.
This program has included building and launching a templatized Alexa skill, releasing low-lift routines for engagement and retention, data-driven voice search optimization and metadata initiatives, and phrase promotion to drive streams.
The Brief
To provide Warner Music group with avenues to leverage their channel, increasing artist engagement and driving streams on the platform.
Our Response
The AI Experience studio provides strategic consultation and operational support for The Voice Lab, a part of Warner Music Group’s innovation team dedicated to leveraging conversational AI to increase artist engagement and drive streams on the platform.
Creativity can produce bold, complex activations, but it can also mean mapping the landscape to find every possible inroad in reaching a client’s goals. We know fans are already looking for and streaming WMG artists via conversational AI –by analyzing the data and identifying and solving friction points, we’ve supported The Voice Lab in finding ways to leverage existing user behaviors.
This program is about identifying key opportunities to bring to the entire organization and, through creative communication, making voice a foundational tool in every artist’s marketing toolbox.
There are two key methods by which we drive engagement. The first, ‘Phrase Promotion,’ aims to build an efficient process for identifying and promoting phrases that effectively stream music across voice assistants and digital service providers (DSPs).
A prime example of this activation is the Vote With Your Voice campaign, which promoted Cody Johnson’s new album by encouraging fans to vote for their favorite track by streaming it on Alexa. The track with the highest number of streams was declared the winner. As a result, the album’s Alexa streams increased by 10%, and the title track’s streams rose by 27%.
‘Branded Routines’ are another way in which we boost streams and listener engagements. This involves creating and sharing Alexa routines with custom messages from the assistant that lead to music streams. GAYLE’s “abcdefu” Alexa routine promotion on TikTok, for example, amassed 1.1 million views.
We also worked with Warner to highlight how they might increase the effectiveness of conversational AI related to music streams. There were two primary ways in which we achieved this:
The VSO Program, a partnership with Amazon, focused on identifying and resolving language recognition issues when streaming priority tracks. There are often issues with Alexia’s ability to track voice commands, and we quality-assured 136 tracks so that they would be easily found via voice activations. Friction was effectively removed, facilitating streaming on Alexa.
The AI Experience studio also took part in the ‘The How Kids Talk’ study, which uncovered opportunities to simplify the process of finding and streaming kids’ music—a top 3 genre on the platform—via voice commands.
GAYLE’s ‘abcdefu’ Alexa promotion reached 1.1M views on TikTok.”
