If this is your first time reading Going Beyond The First Idea, welcome. In this series we break down one of our case studies and focus on how we came up with the idea and the strategy behind it. Too much PR doesn’t take the initial time in the strategy phase and then you are scrambling when it comes to the execution. It’s not how we work. You can’t get the execution, results and measurement of a campaign right if you rush it. Simple as.
So, we’re rolling back the clock a bit for this one, but oh it’s one you’re not going to want to miss. It has a bit of everything, creative, data and some results we’re really proud of.
Introducing Bop or Bot with musicMagpie.
The Idea
Our “Bop or Bot” campaign centred around the mass hysteria that AI was causing in the media. We knew the hot topic was the central talking point of the year (and still is), so our campaign was all about it.
Our idea was to put data to opinion and find out the impact that AI was having on the music industry and the artists themselves. We analysed 1,500 AI-generated covers to calculate exactly how much revenue artists were losing to digital imposters, identifying which musicians were most frequently targeted.
But in classic Bottled Imagination style, we didn’t just stop there. We created our own AI-generated song and challenged the public to distinguish between it and a real track, revealing that despite people’s confidence in spotting AI music, many couldn’t tell the difference (yep, you guessed it, that’s another outreach angle for later in the campaign).
HOW WE CAME UP WITH THE IDEA
We knew AI was a hot topic across all sectors and wanted to explore its impact on the music industry specifically. Throughout our brainstorm process our press analysis tools consistently scored AI-related topics as highly press-worthy (a bit of a no brainer really).
In classic Bottled Imagination style, we are always testing out new tools and innovations to see how we can create the next award-winning PR campaign and format and when new AI tools kept popping up all over the place we decided to test things for ourselves (It seems to be becoming a thing here with our annual leave sign-offs using AI image generation to depict what we will be doing with our time off – but that story is for another day).
Back to the campaign.
We found a new tool where you could create music. Naturally we created our own ultimate summer banger for the office using AI, which turned out to be an absolute bop. This got us thinking, if we could produce something this catchy with our 30-second input, and limited musical talent, imagine what people with actual skill could accomplish. The potential for manipulation seemed enormous.
Our curiosity was further piqued when we saw a fake Drake track go viral with listeners none the wiser, and TikTok videos using Ariana Grande’s AI-generated voice over random songs. We fell down a YouTube rabbit hole of AI-generated music playlists and wondered which artists were being targeted most frequently. The scale of it all was staggering, but yet no one was talking about it and with no hard data.
That’s when we realised we had the perfect tool to extract data from these AI playlists. We could pull titles and artists to identify which voices and songs were being recreated most often. This would give us hard data in an area dominated by speculation and opinion. And just like that, “Bop or Bot” was born, our campaign to put actual numbers to the AI music phenomenon and see just how far the rabbit hole went.
WORDS FROM THE TEAM
”The Bop or Bot campaign is a great example of how PRs can utilise data tools that we use everyday to provide journalists with a unique data set and story. We knew AI was a booming and that journalists would be looking to find new data around the subject matter and we could provide them that with a simple data pull and analysis. While we couldn’t scrape Spotifys archives, we could get playlist data from Youtube which provided us with a solid foundation and understanding on which artists are most likely to be affected by AI. What started from us creating our own silly AI song and guessing whether a song was real or fake, turned into a comprehensive data study putting musicMagpie at the forefront of a growing concern in the music industry.
Eve BennettCreative PR Lead
