Spotify is dedicated to raising the volume on artists and storytellers within the Asian & Pacific Islander community all year round. This Asian & Pacific Islander Heritage Month (APIHM), we honored API artists and creators with a multi-phase, month-long campaign dedicated to amplifying emerging voices in our API community. Our campaign tagline was: “Sound Up. Stand Out. Celebrating Our Stories through sound.”
We selected a group of 7 tentpole API artists to highlight throughout our campaign in May. Some of these artists were also selected via our larger partnership with Gold House Futures. Our 7 tentpole artists represented the rich diversity of our culture and sound:
Throughout the month, we found ways to highlight these 7 artists, their unique backgrounds, and their music, whether it be via billboards, social content, or our Spotify Singles program.
Another goal was not only to help elevate these select emerging artists, but to drive discovery for API artists and creators. We wanted to highlight more ways that users on Spotify could discover new API artists, and utilize our bespoke on-platform tools to promote playlists and destinations dedicated to API artists and podcasters. We looked for ways to collaborate with other Spotify properties like Frequency, our Spotify destination for celebrating Black artists and culture, to further drive discovery and celebrate intersectionality.
We brought this campaign to life through touchpoints both on and off the Spotify platform. To kickoff the campaign, we launched billboards in NYC and Downtown LA featuring our 7 tentpole artists and our campaign tagline. Throughout the month of May, we shared bespoke social content and self-shot videos from our campaign artists – focused around their music and their identity – across our Spotify social channels, including @Spotify, @SpotifyNews, and @SpotifyforArtists.
On the Spotify platform, we refreshed our dedicated API hub destination, which features global playlists, podcasts, and audiobooks from the API community, with mobile banners on-platform driving to the hub throughout the month. We highlighted our flagship API playlist Jasmine, and heavily featured API artists across our Spotify editorial ecosystem – in playlists like EQUAL, Frequency, Fresh Finds, and GLOW, in custom AI DJ segments, and with a takeover of our Taste playlist by API artist Sue Tsai. We also launched Spotify Clips from our featured campaign artists as playlist stories on our flagship API playlist Jasmine, as well as on each tentpole artist’s profiles.
We partnered with Frequency, our Spotify destination for celebrating Black artists and culture, to spotlight the artist UMI, who shared how her Japanese & African American heritages shape her music. We shot a special APIHM edition of our Frequency Zine with her, which includes a digital cover, photoshoot, and interview videos featured on @Spotify and @OurFrequency's social handles. We also partnered with Frequency on social videos that featured Black & Asian artists like Joyce Wrice, Guapdad 4000, and Kaleah Lee talking about their artistry. With our content and selection of artists, we were able to showcase just how diverse and meaningful the API diaspora is.
For the 3rd year in a row, we also collaborated with Gold House on our Gold House Music Accelerator program. Its mission is to create an opportunity for API music artists to gain exposure, mentorship, and performance opportunities. The year’s Gold House Futures artists were Emei, Paravi, and Towa Bird, and members of our team at Spotify were part of the selection committee. In addition to heavily featuring these three artists as tentpole artists in our month’s campaign billboards and social content, we also hosted a bespoke masterclass for them on best practices for growing an audience on Spotify. We invited each of them to the Spotify Studio at our LA Mateo office to record original Spotify Singles, which we released on-platform on May 15th and prompted with a billboard in Times Square and a bespoke social announcement. We also invited the artist Towa Bird, whose main goal in the program was to gain experience in performing live, for a special performance in our LA office. With our Gold House partnership, we were able to further create exposure and opportunities for these three emerging API artists to help build their burgeoning careers.
We took a 360 approach to this year’s APIHM campaign and showed up everywhere possible - social/digital, on-platform, as well as IRL. We spotlighted an amazing group of artists throughout the month of May. Even more, we gave fans a glimpse into the more personal sides of their favorite artists.
Our social posts garnered over 1.5M organic impressions and 47.2K engagements – with fans in the comments excited to see their favorite artists featured.
Our on-platform mobile banners driving to our API hub and playlists on-platform garnered over 18.5M impressions.
