The Live Quiz Release

Background

Popaganda was one of Sweden's biggest indie music festivals, but it was also the last one to take place in an overcrowded summer. So creating hype among fans and getting journalists to write about the artist line-up was essential to boost early ticket sales. And early ticket sales were essential for survival in a market where "festival death" had seen two major festivals filing for bankruptcy this summer alone.

The ambitions were to double the amount of media exposure compared to the 2012 launch and break the festival's record for ticket sales.

Idea

Instead of sending out a press release and putting up posters, the artists booked for Popaganda were revealed through a live quiz release. Fans and music journalists were invited to an event at Stockholm's biggest outdoor nightclub to figure out the whole line-up themselves.

At the launch, over 1,000 people came to see three bands perform cover versions of songs by the artists booked. For every song, the first person who tweeted the correct artist's name and tagged it #popa13 won a ticket to the festival. The whole event was livestreamed on Popagandas website so people outside of Stockholm could take part. All tweets were shown in realtime on big screens and as soon as someone guessed right, the artists' name then appeared on the festival poster. News of the bookings spread with every guess tweeted, building online buzz for Popaganda and getting more and more people engaged in seeing which artist would be the next one to appear on the festival poster.

Soon #popa13 trended on Twitter, providing proof to the insight that if there's one thing indie pop fans and music journalists love even more than music, it is showing off their superior knowledge of it.

Results

Sweden's biggest entertainment maga- zine No¨jesguiden loved the idea so much that they live streamed the event on their website free of charge.

• +50% increase of Facebook fans and Twitter followers.
• May 30 #popa13 trended on Twitter (3rd ranked trend in Sweden) giving a total reach of 123,997 users.
• Over 1,000 people attended The Live Quiz Release and more than 3,500 followed the online stream.
• The Live Quiz Release led to 196 media exposures in May-June 2013 compared to 28 exposures May-June 2012.
• Sales May 30 - August 1 were up 264% compared to the previous record.
• Tickets to both days of the festival sold out.

Our Thoughts

Several things about this are interesting. One, it had never really occurred to me before how competitive the music festival scene must be. Two, you can be right-on and hip and something everybody likes but you still have to fight to exist. Three, in the struggle for survival, creativity gives you an unfair advantage over your competitors. While every other festival was doing same-old, same-old, this is magnificently left-field. Promote a festival by having a festival – on a smaller scale and not with your headline acts but with wannabe bands. And then make everyone guess what it is they are playing. It’s charming, amusing, and very shareable as is evidenced by the fact that each of the 1,000 at the event helped spread the news to 100 others.