i’ll make this feel like home...

Former One Direction star Louis Tomlinson released his debut album in 2020 through Sony but moved to BMG for his second album, Faith In The Future, in November 2022. Lisa Wilkinson, director of UK marketing (new recordings) at BMG, explains how they looked to reposition him in the market, what learnings were coming from his live success as well as his own festival, why his merchandise strategy directly informed his multi-formatted record release strategy, how they were able to build him without mass radio support, where a wider male audience was targeted this time round, why Twitter remains his most powerful social media platform and how a highly vocal and engaged fanbase was nurtured further and directly involved in the campaign. 

1. Coming to BMG for his second solo album

This is his first album with BMG. His debut album, Walls in 2020, was with Syco Music [via Sony]. That was off the back of X Factor with Simon Cowell.

He had done a couple of more commercial singles – one with Steve Aoki [‘Just Hold On’] and one with Bebe Rexha and Digital Farm Animals [‘Back To You’]. They were really successful streaming singles, but that’s not who Louis is. For the boys in One Direction, the ones that have been successful and the songs that have been successful are the ones that have stayed super pop and commercial. Louis did that but it’s just not who he is.

"I think he felt, in that structure, that he just wasn’t getting the support to be who he wanted to be. That’s exactly why people come to us. It’s an artist services deal and we’re there to support you and advise you."

You can see from his live business and his merchandise business – and every other thing that Louis does – that there is an incredible fanbase there for him.

When they [Syco] released Walls, they achieved 14,000 units in week one and got to number 4 in Q1 in January 2020. We thought that just didn’t feel reflective of what was happening [around him].

We went and saw him at various venues on his world tour. We went to New York and saw those two shows and we went to Italy and watched his Milan stadium show in front of 30,000 people.

"You’re looking and you’re thinking, “Those numbers don’t make any sense. How on Earth did you fumble that?” We were confident that we could do better than that."

He had a signing dinner in October 2021 and then his world tour started in February 2000, which was the delayed tour [due to the pandemic]. It went all the way through to September, pretty much nonstop.

They sold half a million tickets that year. All the while he’s on tour, he’s still making the album.

‘Out Of My System’ was released as a DSP-focused track before the album. It’s the rockiest and heaviest track on the album. He came straight off stage, went into a vocal booth off the side of the stage [to record it]. Because of the energy, he was so fired up. It was a difficult process because it was creating an album on the road.

He wanted to make an album for live. It was a totally different experience for him. Covid hit just a few months after Walls dropped so the tour was out of the question.

Before we started working on the album campaign, he did a show at Crystal Palace Bowl, which was the first incarnation of his Away From Home festival that he’s created and curated, which is for up-and-coming indie bands.

He gave away 8,000 tickets in August 2021 when we could start doing outdoor things again. I was there and was thinking, “There’s something big going on here.” The fans were so committed and dedicated.

"Considering this is someone who hasn’t had real radio support or is seen in celebrity magazines or on social posts, this is a huge phenomenon."

That continued into the tour.

2. The centrality of merchandise

We started on the creative really early and that was a key factor in how successful the album was. We knew early on from discussions with management that his merch business was berserk. We knew what kind of fans he has. With their merch drops during Covid, they played around with the strategy. They got in a really cool design team and they would just do regular drops – limited-edition releases and you’ll never see it again. Everything just sold out constantly.

That informed the whole product strategy.

"We knew we had to make product that’s limited in its nature because it encourages demand."

The fans just want it. It’s got to look amazing; it’s got to have Louis looking phenomenal because they just adore him; it’s got to be priced right; and there’s got to be a selection. So it’s more stuff, but less of it.

"Instead of treating it like a music product, treat it like merchandise. We absolutely nailed that strategy."

We sold 35,000 records and around 2,500 units were streaming. A good chunk of that was physical album sales. It’s going to inform our strategy for any other albums we do with him.

We did 19 products in the end. We did a standard CD, we did a CD ‘zine which had 82 pages of beautiful content and photos, we had a picture disc vinyl, we did around eight different exclusive retail vinyl albums, we had a splatter vinyl for HMV, we had a colour one for Amazon, we had a clear one for Spotify, we had several more for Urban Outfitters and Target, we had an indie retailers one.

It was a collector thing: how many of the vinyl albums have you managed to get? We did a double deluxe vinyl for D2C. We did cassettes where the artwork joined together when you got all three. They were embossed and glowed in the dark. Louis has Easter eggs that he drops everywhere. The number 28 is like a lucky number, so you see 28 dotted around places. The same with 369 – he uses it in many iterations. If you had a UV light, you’d be able to see ‘3’, ‘6’ and ‘9’ embossed on each cassette.

"That range and that strategy was probably 80% of what made it super successful this time around."

3. The radio conundrum

We have seen historically that it has been tricky to get radio for him – but not because of any artist proposition issue. It’s just sonically that he wants to do something different to what radio wants to play.

It’s tricky because it falls through the gaps a little bit with what he wants to do. We’ve always looked at it as: let’s just assume there are zero promo opportunities at radio, TV and press. Let’s just take out promo entirely.

What you have got is a global, engaged, fanatical fanbase. You can do more with that than you can with those other things if you don’t have fans.

"I would much rather have an artist who’s got an absolutely berserk global fanbase and that gets absolutely no support from traditional media – because you can work with that – than have an artist that’s not really got a particularly big fanbase but radio loves them and TV loves them. What does that matter if you’ve not got the fans?"

The first single was ‘Bigger Than Me’, which is a big song to sing. It was a good bridge between the last album and this album. It gave the fans what they wanted.

We had really good feedback from radio. They played it to Clara [Amfo, Radio 1] without telling her who it was. She loved it and she did actually play it as one of the hottest tracks of the week. Greg James’s producers said it was brilliant. They absolutely adored it. Matt Edmondson and Mollie King’s team loved it. They thought it was great. But it got blocked at playlist conversations. It was like, Come on!

"That was really disappointing because, pre-release, we were getting incredible feedback from producers, but we just couldn’t get it through the playlisting. We’d always planned for it not to go on radio, but if it got on radio that’d be just a brilliant bonus. So it didn’t harm our campaign strategy at all."

He’s too pop for indie stations and he’s too indie for the BBC [Radio 1]. It’s frustrating, but he’s making the music he wants to make and the fans love it. So what do you do?

‘Silver Tongues’ came out just before the album dropped, which was the official second single. That bridged the gap between those two singles. It was much more guitar based. It was up-tempo but it wasn’t too indie.

On the day that the album was released, fans bombarded Greg’s show on the 10 Minute Takeover [on the Radio 1 breakfast show]. And he played it! It was lovely but you could tell it was done like, “OK, I’ve done it now. Go away.” Which is just so sad because his demographic is right in that lane. It’s 18-25.

4. Targeting a male audience

‘Out Of My System’ was released as a DSP track, and that was really to show a different side of what was going to be on the album. It was the hardest one, the rockiest one, the speediest one, it was all about the band. It is one of the best streaming tracks on the album; it has really taken hold.

That was really just to get the male audience because we knew from the analytics we had prior to release that, although his demographics on social media are largely female, wider research that we did with our media teams said that he has a male fanbase. They’re just consumers. If they were to hear him on the radio, they wouldn’t turn it off – that kind of thing – but they’re not necessarily following him on social media. We knew that there was an opportunity there to reach another audience.

5. Building his songwriting profile

We just gave him creative freedom. Louis is really smart. He was the most proficient songwriter within One Direction. He has more songwriting credits than any of the other four members. We know that he’s a talented songwriter so it was just putting him together with people who can give him the confidence, like this album did, to move him out of his comfort zone.

There are some tracks on there that he will say were inspired by people like DMA’s and their album The Glow. ‘All This Time’ and ‘She Is Beauty We Are World Class’ have that slightly more experimental sound to them, which I think took a few people by surprise. He has really incredible writers like David Sneddon, Robert Harvey, George Tizzard and Rick Parkhouse. He has said multiple times in interviews that they gave him the confidence to have fun with it.

I don’t think he expected to get the amount of tracks that he did. It was a big album with 16 tracks. Then we put another three tracks on a digital deluxe edition in week one which shifted another 15,000 units globally.

6. Targeting the press

One of the big wins we had on this campaign was the NME coming on board. They were not interested last time. There was no music press. So one of our key targets on this campaign was to get music press.

We really wanted to get a Rolling Stone cover but the one we wanted to go for Harry was on. So we shifted and we retargeted the NME. We took them to Louis’ Away From Home festival in Malaga [in summer 2022]. He sold it out – 15,000 tickets in 24 hours.

"NME did various interviews with Louis for their website and for their socials. They spoke to the bands that were on. It was a real seal of approval. And from that point onwards, we had nothing but great press from NME."

They supported everything – all the singles and we got a four-star review of the album. It was not like we bought it, but it was because we put them in the right place to really see him.

7. Boosting the digital strategy

There were two real strategic decisions that we made at the beginning that affected the outcome: one was the physical product strategy; and the other was the digital marketing strategy. If you don’t have traditional promo, and you’ve got an ardent global fanbase, digital is the most important way of getting your marketing across.

"When we first started working with management, they said to us that there were some things that were non-negotiable. Everything should be fair, so we shouldn’t feel like we’re only offering things to fans of a certain demographic or to fans in a certain territory. It’s global. It’s got to be accessible. It’s got to be affordable. And it’s got to be innovative."

They are so good at doing things that break records and break the internet.

They did their livestream in 2020 and Louis sold over 200,000 tickets. It was the most-streamed livestream of a male solo artist during lockdown.

They had quite high expectations of the digital campaign going forward.

We spent quite a long time, about three months, prior to launching trying to figure out how we were going to break the internet.

With #LT369, we trended within about five minutes worldwide of that hashtag going out. When you tweeted the hashtag, it took you to a mini site where a Twitter map was starting to flag where people’s locations were. Over the course of the teaser week, the flags started to fall away but would leave ‘BTM’ which stood for ‘Bigger Than Me’, so we were teasing the single name.

We did a playlist builder and it was generated on socials as a cassette mixtape. You could share it and design your own cover on it. These were just things that really got the fans talking and engaged.

8. QR code and interactive community map at his Away From Home festival

The interactive map was linked to a QR code. We put QR codes around the festival site with absolutely no explanation as to what they were. But the fans notice everything.

We put the track titles from the album in pictures. They were really, really hidden. It took the fans two days [to work it out], but they observe everything.

Everyone started using the QR code. It took them to a website. We hadn’t announced at that point that the album was going to drop or that it was coming. It was a real mystery but that started the chatter going and we started getting trending hashtags for the album.

9. Twitter as his main platform and setting him up on TikTok

Twitter is his biggest platform [with 35.7 million followers]. What’s really interesting about that is that it’s super conversational, and you can see what they’re doing – as opposed to other platforms like Instagram and Facebook. He’s probably one of the only artists that still uses it as their primary platform.

He is really active on Twitter. He will go through bouts where he doesn’t post but then he’ll go on a reply rampage. He just replies randomly to people and does 40 in an hour. The fans go absolutely wild. Twitter was our key platform for launching initiatives and activations

There is a HQ account on TikTok and it crashed part of TikTok when it launched. Management love knowing that they crash things. We “crashed” our D2C site within minutes. There was a queue of 200,000 people in the D2C store at one point within the first hour of launching.

We didn’t technically crash the D2C store but, because of the size of the queue, it shut the storefront down which is what it does, and then forms a queue so that it doesn’t crash. We went on there and could see there were 200,000 people queuing.

10. Chart battle with Bruce Springsteen and the power of in-stores

I don’t think he ever thought he wasn’t getting a number 1 album. We beat Bruce Springsteen, we did it in Q4 and we doubled the numbers that Sony did week one last time [on Walls].

When we were in week one, and we were battling out with Bruce Springsteen, we said that there were an easy 3,000 units there if we put on four Banquet Records shows [at Pryzm in West London] and bundle the album with the tickets.

"Every time they put a show on sale, you could see the numbers on the webpage. There were 200,000 people on there, even people who were not in the UK. They were ridiculous numbers."

It was more than Banquet has ever done. We sold out three shows in under a minute.

That was on release week. We had a really solid release week strategy so we knew that we had three shows in the pocket with Banquet.

We had two tracks that had not been released at that point, that weren’t on the album, that weren’t on the deluxe and that hadn’t been released as singles. We created a £4.99 digital album that had another two brand new tracks on it. You could only buy it as an album product and it was a D2C download.

We sold 15,000 of those globally in week one. We sold 6,000 in the UK. We did 3,000 extra records with Banquet in week one via the shows. We did an additional 3,000 with signed product that we put on sale in week one, because there were no other signed products in the market.

The digital super deluxe did 6,000 units. We ran multiple competitions. We gave away a signed guitar with HMV. We did a golden ticket to the tour with Crash Records.

We did a two-day pop up in Camden [North London] and Amazon contributed with signage. We did a one-day one in New York as well. We sold pop-up exclusive merch and we re-sleeved splatter vinyl with a London pop-up sleeve. We did around 2,000 of those. We did the same with the CDs and re-sleeved some CDs with the London pop-up. They were unique and fans could not get it again so they flew out the door. We had 3,000 people show up for it. That was full capacity.

We premiered the video for ‘Silver Tongues’, the second single, at the pop-up. That was the weekend of release but the single, which came out earlier that week, the video dropped on the Saturday.

11. Stationhead and Tim’s Twitter Listening Party

Stationhead is an interesting concept and we’ve done it a few times now. It’s linked to streaming, so every time you play a track within the show, it’s technically streamed by the amount of people that are listening to the show. Louis did one of those and, in terms of Stationhead’s history, it was pretty successful.

We got an email from Tim Burgess’s team saying they wanted to do a Tim’s Twitter Listening Party with Louis. They had such a good rapport and the fans were asking for it.

Beyond the chart units from the streams, it is the noise that it creates online that is more important to us.

It was one of their biggest re-listening streams, which is amazing when you think about the demographic that they have.

12. Fan-made Spotify Canvases

Across socials, we asked people to rework the ‘Bigger Than Me’ artwork. As a way of getting people to go and stream the track, we would change the Canvas semi-regularly so there was a reason for people to go and play it to see if their Canvas was one of the ones that had been selected.

The only downside is Canvases are only seven-seconds long. So if you go and you watch for seven seconds, it’s not your artwork and you come off, it can affect your average listening rate.

We were mindful of that. Our strategy was to do that post-pitching for any real major lists so that they weren’t looking at the data.

"He has got really good listening data. It’s around 15 plays per listener which is way over the average. The save rate to libraries is huge and shows that he has really got a good lean-in listenership."

13. Documentary and the next steps

He’s going back on tour. He is back on another world tour from April starting in Asia and then he goes to North America. Then he comes back to Europe, culminating in an O2 show in London this time around in November. He previously did Wembley Arena.

The documentary [All Of Those Voices] premiered on 16th March and then went to worldwide cinemas on 22nd March for a week.

harlie Lightening made it and went on tour with Louis. He had previously made the Liam Gallagher documentary [As It Was]. Historically he’s done most of Louis’ music videos as well. It was only this time around that we wanted to branch out and see if we could do something a little bit different.

It goes from the band through to his personal life and where he is now. There is a massive focus on the tour. It will blow people away to see what the Louis franchise looks like. This kid has an amazing franchise and most people just don’t have any clue about it.

"The recordings business is such a small part of what he does. Obviously it helps to have records out to sell merch and to go on tour. That’s where he really excels."

I’ve never worked on a project where the fans are like they are. You get to see your visions immediately. You get to see the reactions immediately. You get to see the activation work immediately. That is such a buzz.

Louis Tomlinson World Tour: Paris, Night 1. (5 April 2022)