Austin – At the world’s first audio-visual listening bar, Spotify has unveiled a new way of interacting with music.
Canvas is a new format by the Swedish streaming giant that allows artists to upload 8-second looping visuals that play with every track, allowing listeners to communicate with music in new ways. The campaign, Your Art Has the Power to Move, was celebrated with the opening of the world’s first audio-visual listening bar, which took place during music festival Austin City Limits.
At the Canvas Records listening bar, visitors could browse hundreds of custom-created frames replicating classic vinyl record sleeves, which displayed dynamic video art by musicians such as Billie Eilish, Bon Iver and John Mayer. ‘The second we imagined how amazing it would be to walk into a record store where every single album cover was alive, we knew we had to figure out a way to make it a reality,’ says Spencer LaVallee and Evan Schultz, creative directors at FIG, the agency behind the activation.
As social media becomes a central part of our listening habits, visual content has the potential to transform the two-dimensional streaming experience.