Spotify Webcast Press Event Featuring Frank Ocean, Janelle Monae, Vampire Weekend and More

December 2012. New York City, Cedar Lake

Spotify is a fast-growing Internet music service with over 20 million active users and 5 million paid subscribers in 17 countries. For a recent series of business-to-business and press events in New York City, Spotify once again tapped Empire Entertainment to serve as its production company partner. The single-day project was composed of two separate events: a mid-day press event that would be webcast live to locations around the world and an evening party that would feature a lineup of some of biggest names in music performing in an intimate setting.

Held at Chelsea’s Cedar Lake Dance Center in New York City, the venue’s raw space was completely designed to facilitate a sleek white main stage for the webcast presentation, demo and panel discussion and additional, smaller stages that would support the live band performances.

The press program was hosted by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, who spoke to the music & technology media audience about the future of the company. In addition to news about the evolving Spotify platform, Ek announced that Metallica's 30-year catalog would now be available on Spotify. Present at the announcement was Metallica drummer, Lars Ulrich, who surprised the audience by appearing onstage alongside Napster’s Sean Parker for an engaging discussion about their history together, and specifically, the issues of musician royalties. The discussion was moderated by Executive Arts and Entertainment Editor of The Huffington Post Media Group, Michael Hogan.

Following the press event, Empire quickly reset the space to prepare for the evening party. Just a few short hours later NYC indie rock band Vampire Weekend kicked off the night’s musical performances with renditions of “Holiday” and a special guitar version of “I Stand Corrected” performed in-the-round.

Next up, R&B / soul artist Janelle Monáe took the stage with her full band. Her rhythm section and horns performed on one stage while she and her guitarist Kellindo delivered a blistering performance from the center stage ringed with fans. The closing performance of the party was delivered by breakout artist Frank Ocean who had just been nominated for an incredible six Grammy awards the previous night. Ocean mesmerized the intimate audience with his renditions of “Pyramids” and a cover of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees".

Empire was responsible for working with the Spotify team to develop a creative vision from renderings to reality, and managed all aspects of scenic, décor, audio, video, lighting, webcast and event management. The main stage featured a giant, curved LED wall and a series of ten LED columns set along flanking runway stages. All the screen content for both events was created custom for this event and was mapped to run on all of the LED surfaces simultaneously. In order to accommodate the musical performances of all the acts in the evening, Empire designed a unique audio system that featured four separate audio systems to support four different staging positions in the room.

Empire is the leading producer of innovative product launches and webcast press events and is a top event marketing agency to some of today’s fastest-growing Internet and media brands.