Stunning web for Alan Walker’s first album
Sony Music / MER
Alan Walker is one of the world's greatest DJs, regularly performing at the world's biggest festivals such as Coachella, Tomorrowland, and Ultra Music Festival. He has billions of streams and a large social media following of millions of people around the world. Behind the global phenomenon of Alan Walker is the record label Sony Music and his management, MER.
Sony Music / MER
Alan Walker is one of the world's greatest DJs, regularly performing at the world's biggest festivals such as Coachella, Tomorrowland, and Ultra Music Festival. He has billions of streams and a large social media following of millions of people around the world. Behind the global phenomenon of Alan Walker is the record label Sony Music and his management, MER.
Background
On behalf of Sony Music, we had the opportunity to deliver a technical solution as part of the promotion of the album Different World by Alan Walker.
Sony presented an idea with a high technical bar to impress a tech-savvy target audience with high expectations. The task was to build a memorable web experience where Alan Walker's fans could listen to the upcoming album after solving a puzzle that alludes to facts about previous song releases.
In addition to the technical production, a key challenge was to ensure we could handle the large volume of traffic that was expected in a short time. In addition, the solution needed to work well globally, given that Alan Walker's fans are spread around the world, regardless of geographical distance and internet connection.
Our solution
The technical solution was built around AWS to handle a large amount of global traffic in a short time. The solution used modern web technologies such as WebGL for special effects and web sockets for real-time chat.
To excite Walker's fans and play upon their interests, the rebus challenge mimicked a terminal that contributed to a sense that visitors needed to hack the server to access the preview version of the album.
The results
The site was appreciated by Alan Walker fans and the album was well received. Currently, the album's songs have a total of nearly four billion streams on Spotify.
