Mood Board: How Spotify built a ‘house of audio’ in lower Manhattan

“Spotify is everywhere,” said the company’s host and storyteller of its owned editorial channels, Lea Palmieri, during an Instagram Live promoting its latest experiential campaign. Spotify is even in Manhattan, where it’s near impossible to rent an apartment these days.

But for two days in early August, the brand transformed an industrial venue in the West Village into a home and led visitors on IRL and virtual tours of the space in an effort to educate users about its many bells and whistles, like its partnerships and in-app features.

The event, dubbed “Spotify Everywhere,” was far from Spotify’s first experiential rodeo, even since the pandemic. It had a presence at Cannes Lions this summer, for instance, bringing artists like Kendrick Lamar, Dua Lipa, and Post Malone to perform on its “Spotify Beach” thanks to its in-house experiential team.

For Spotify Everywhere, that team was faced with the challenge of turning the listening experience into something that people could also see, touch, taste, and smell. To pull it off, the experiential team relied on partners like Sony, Google, Xbox, Samsung, Philips Hue, and Roku, as well as free food and drinks. Why else do people go to events?

Building the house: Spotify Everywhere started with the idea of creating an “immersive house of audio where music and podcasts were everywhere you turned,” Keyana Kashfi, Spotify’s global senior director of experiential and content production, told Marketing Brew in an email.

It took three months to plan the two-day event, according to Kashfi. Finding the right venue was of particular importance.

“We needed a space large enough that we could build our very own house and make it feel like when you entered the space, you were walking up to a home built by Spotify,” Kashfi explained.

Each room featured a product or tool that can be used to listen to audio, like the array of smart speakers on display in the living room greeting visitors as they entered, or the closet filled with Sony LinkBuds, Garmin smartwatches, and Amazon Echo Frames.

Kardashian-inspired kitchen: One of the main attractions of the house was, of course, the kitchen, which “took inspiration from the infamous Kardashian pantry,” Kashfi said.

The room featured a “fun, colorful countertop to create a unique content-capture moment” for the influencers in attendance, Kashfi said.

The kitchen wasn’t purely aesthetic, though. It also featured treats from local bakeries plus a Samsung fridge that can be integrated with Spotify.

Easter eggs 🤝 literal eggs: Inside that fridge were a number of Easter eggs. Also actual eggs, which doubled as a hidden message thanks to a scannable code leading to a related Spotify playlist. There was even real caviar in the fridge, another Easter egg that scanned out to RapCaviar, one of the most popular playlists on the platform, according to Kashfi.

“You might discover a new playlist that you didn’t know about, and it made the event feel even more interactive than it already was,” Palmieri said.

The move was, quite literally, catering to Gen Z, one of the key target audiences for the event. The demo “loves discovering hidden easter eggs,” Kashfi said, and the fridge was indeed a hit, Palmieri told us.

“I saw how many times they had to wipe that down because there were so many fingerprints on it,” she said. “People were obsessed.”

Palmieri was recently tapped to host events for Spotify—including its Spotify House during CMA Fest earlier this summer—given her background as a journalist and video and audio content creator, she said.

Keepin’ it cool: Spotify’s temporary digs were full of pink and purple hues, from the walls to the t-shirts the employees were wearing. The colors “felt fresh and light for the hot NYC days,” Kashfi told us.

Plus, the color palette was highly Instagramable for all the social media stars in attendance, including influencers Robbi Jan and Alex Costa, astrologer Aliza Kelly, and actor Emily Meade.

Kashfi didn’t share any specific metrics associated with the event’s performance on social, but said it “generated a high volume of social buzz across Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.” All in all, over 200 people showed up for the event, Kashfi said.