The problem
This summer season, 4th Ground Artistic was busy settling into Sony Music U.Ok.’s lately relocated London headquarters in King’s Cross. Making ready and finishing any residence or workplace transfer creates a second for reflection, as one leaves acquainted areas and routines behind to find new ones. Workplace house planning and design additionally supply insights into enterprise focuses and priorities.
Trying again, 4th Ground Artistic was launched in 2019 with the intention of bringing collectively artistic and strategic capabilities beneath one umbrella. Since then, the way in which we market artists and assist their music attain new individuals has continued to evolve quickly to require a multidisciplinary, collaborative and agile strategy.
The method of getting acquainted with our new office in one in every of London’s main tech hubs additionally serves as inspiration to look forward and picture the long run capabilities of music corporations, because the media ecosystem continues to create new methods for artists to specific artistic imaginative and prescient and communicate to followers.
The method
The revitalized King’s Cross space is designed with neighborhood in thoughts and is rising as a preeminent artistic and tech hub. And whereas “neighborhood” could also be a buzzword du jour, it’s a worthwhile train to interrupt down the defining traits of neighborhood and take a look at how these translate to practices within the music business.
One space of elevated consideration is the evolution of artist fan base-building to concentrate on neighborhood. Traditionally, document labels have constructed their providers to assist artists in getting information to market, constructing advertising and marketing efforts round a one-to-many mannequin reminiscent of broadcast or the follower-based fashions of social media. In actual phrases, this has meant taking a look at methods to combine the cultivation of a neighborhood of followers who can join with each other throughout a spread of shared pursuits alongside audience-building.
Artists or music could also be on the heart of neighborhood, introduced collectively on platforms like Discord, Reddit or Fb Teams, or music could also be an adjoining subject to different core pursuits constructed round media, video games, NFT initiatives and the like. Sony Music U.Ok. is popping our consideration to this increasingly, as artists reminiscent of Nothing However Thieves have begun to construct communities on Discord. This then prompts us to take a look at the ability units required for administration of fan communities and methods to construct a robust advertising and marketing software equipment on-platform.
Moreover, we’re experimenting with creating moments constructed round artists amongst present communities, reminiscent of on Roblox. Most lately, we collaborared with Columbia Information U.Ok. to facilitate a metaverse live performance efficiency by U.Ok. singer-songwriter George Ezra on Roblox, set inside an immersive expertise impressed by the lyrical world of his newest U.Ok. No. 1 album, Gold Rush Child.
Trying on the workplace design, we are able to see the affect of tech and tendencies on how house is utilized and in addition get an perception into how we’re evolving to additional assist artists. For instance, as a part of our Voice Lab initiative, the group is within the course of of making devoted house in King’s Cross to check artist releases and voice search.
The brand new capabilities opened up by the on-site voice testing services are key to the group’s wider drive to develop finest observe for voice-first search, which is changing into a regular a part of artist and music advertising and marketing as voice navigation continues to mature as a software for music discovery. Our efforts embody the event of social movies that present followers methods to request their favourite artists on voice units in addition to the optimization of observe metadata based mostly on search patterns.
Moreover, 4th Ground Artistic might be establishing a gaming room with the intent of making an off-the-cuff house for artists and workers to check and play new recreation titles as a part of exploring methods artists and music may be additional built-in inside the gaming ecosystem. It will enable us to construct on gaming initiatives like Ezra collaboration, plus others like Music for Nations’ collaboration with Blizzard Leisure, integrating their artists’ music into cell recreation Diablo Immortal.
The takeaway
Workplace planning and design performs an vital position not solely in supporting workers wants but additionally in creating purpose-led areas to facilitate studying and incubation of latest firm capabilities. The elevated focus on growing neighborhood inside an workplace by way of integration and use of social house helps create new moments for inner relationship constructing and collaboration.
An workplace transfer is an effective immediate to reevaluate what’s wanted—and what’s not—to navigate the long run.
