The Power of Sound

The business problem

Sila Zvuka was built around live performances of artists' songs in new arrangements. Before I reworked the format, Zvuk ran these as press-only events and judged them on coverage and potential reach. Nobody tracked click-throughs into the service, sign-ups or streams: there was no measurable entry point into the product.

The marketing department, which housed Artist Relations, had one priority — bringing artists' audiences into streaming. I proposed using the concert invitation itself as the reason to listen on Zvuk. The hypothesis: access to a live show would push fans to open the service, discover what it could do and lift target MAU.

Earning the invitation by listening

Venue capacity ruled out open registration, so I built a contest for listeners. For each edition the editorial team assembled a playlist of tracks from the lineup, and every artist posted their own tagged link. Fans landed in the app or the mobile web player, signed up or logged in, and listened.

Once the contest closed, the team pulled the data and sent invitations to the most active listeners. I built in artist-level attribution: the tagged links let us separate click-throughs, installs and return sessions by source.

Lineup and barter model

I booked the lineup against two jobs at once: acquisition and press. That meant artists with active fan communities willing to take part in the contest, alongside names with enough media weight to interest journalists. Every slot had to earn attention one way or the other.

Participation ran on barter: Zvuk provided advertising inventory worth the artist's usual fee. In return, artists posted project materials carrying their tagged link, performed, joined rehearsals and did press. The arrangement secured both the performances and the campaign support with no cash fees.

Handing the project to the team

I ran the first edition alone while I was still hiring. From the next one on I handed over day-to-day management and kept sign-off on preparation and on the final result.

On one of the later editions a mid-campaign check showed acquisition running behind. The team and I switched on push notifications and in-app pop-ups to make up the traffic — which proved the campaign could still be corrected after promotion had started.

Limits of the analytics

During the later editions the app was unavailable in the App Store, so iPhone users were sent to the mobile web version. Installs stopped being a comparable metric across the whole audience, and we did not revise the project's target metric in time.

In the post-mortem I flagged the gap: the final reports lacked data on sign-ups, log-ins and activity in the web player. So I separated the confirmed growth in streams from the unproven effect on active and paying users. For the next iteration I set the requirement to measure acquisition through actions available to users on any platform.

Team

I owned the mechanic, the funnel, the attribution, the lineup principles and the barter model. I coordinated the cross-functional teams and stayed accountable for the result after handing over delivery.