Scaling Little Dragon’s Fan to Band Connection With Twilio and Pusher

Scaling Little Dragon’s Fan to Band Connection With Twilio and Pusher

After nearly twenty years of writing, recording and touring, Swedish rockers Little Dragon have amassed thousands of loyal fans. To promote their upcoming album, they wanted to find a way to reach their fans authentically, and intimately. With the help of rock-minded developer Lee Martin and Twilio, Little Dragon reached out to 19,000 fans in an unusually personal way.

Lee’s final product for Little Dragon let their fans into the band’s living room for a series of phone calls, videos and performances, synced together so tightly that the fans felt like they were there.

A Private Performance For 19,000 Fans

Yukimi, the lead singer of Little Dragon, is already reaching for the phone by the time your browser loads Little Dragon’s site. She’s asking for your number so she can call you.

What you’re seeing isn’t a real live stream into Little Dragon’s living room. But, Yukimi’s call is very real. As soon as you give her your number, you’ll get a call via Twilio Voice. Right when you answer, you’ll see Yukimi pacing around the living room on your computer screen, while you listen to her telling you about the band’s new record through the phone. The two mediums are synced perfectly.
The phone gets passed around to Erik, Fredrik, Arild, and Håkan, who all walk in and out of the room, taking turns talking to you. Then, the band grabs their guitars, drums and keyboards to plays their new single “Klapp Klapp”.

Scaling The Fan/Band Connection

Under The Hood of Little Dragon

• Lee used Twilio Voice API to trigger calls at specific times during the video when the band members hang up, and pick up the phone.
• He used Pusher to create a real-time event and trigger the video to sync with the audio of the Twilio phone call.
  The video itself was shot by the band, edited in Adobe Creative Cloud and streamed via HTML 5 video.

Calling Fans Back

20,000+ calls later, Lee is confident the fans thoroughly enjoyed the smoke and mirrors. The site won even FWA’s site of the day award, here. Even though Little Dragon’s single release is in the past, Lee says the band has plans for using Twilio to reach out to fans in the future.

“There’s all sorts of cool things you could do — announce a remix or the next single only to the fans who called up. It’s all nice and good when we did this initially, but there is a marketing sensibility to it”

[featured image courtesy of Billboard.com ]