SECTOR
Music
SERVICES
Consumer Closeness
Creative Briefing
OFFICE
London
Markets
United Kingdom
THE CHALLENGE
Sony Music’s insight team needed to engage Gen Z UK Rap fans — a passionate but notoriously hard-to-reach audience who switch off at anything remotely uncool, ruling out traditional recruitment and research methods.
THE APPROACH & INSIGHT
We swapped recruiter panels and questionnaires for PAVE zine, a collaborative fanzine that positioned fans as contributors, not respondents. Targeted social recruitment, flyers and gig-side outreach drew grime fans from Glasgow to drill fans from inner-city London, who shared three weeks of self-recorded life content before joining Sony Music for a hands-on zine-making workshop.
The work delivered the best-ever engagement scores for a consumer closeness programme at Sony Music, culminating in a launch event that brought contributors together with over 20 senior executives — turning raw insight into a lasting internal engagement programme. Want to get close to an audience everyone else struggles to reach? Let’s do it together.
Loved it. We worked very closely with The Mix to design the work to really speak to our internal audiences and it did just that.
Martin Vovk Consumer intelligence, Sony Music
