It's a Match!

Since Google bought YouTube in 2006, the service has been trying to integrate many kinds of subscriptions and financing systems to the platform to coexist parallelly with its advertising strategy. Simultaneously, the company has decided to build a larger share of music users with services like Google Play Music and other not so successful formulas like YouTube Red and YouTube Premium. To distill this messy panorama of musical options and design a feasible service to be able to compete against Spotify or Soundcloud finally, Google has presented YouTube Music. The service takes advantage of the vast amount of creators and record labels hosted on YouTube and introduces a monthly subscription to get unlimited and offline content from the platform.

"It's a Match" is an advertising campaign designed as an interactive sound and visual installation to introduce the new platform to the city.

The game starts when both a pedestrian walking along Penn Ave and an employee at the Google's Offices' bridge accept to play. For that, both users will be asked to introduce their YouTube user names so the central computer can find their musical preferences. The YouTube hosting services will return two lists with their most listened songs, artists and genders and will find a match in this order. If the computer detects a matching song, it will return it; if it is an artist or a gender, it will return a song hosted in any trending list performed by this artist of belonging to this gender. In any case, the game is designed to always return a match, so both users get a reward. At this point the computer will send a video signal to display the message 'It's a match' at the LED display in the bridge. Followed by this message, the selected song will be played simultaneously inside the resting area of the bridge, with a set of indoor speakers, in the street, with a set of outdoor directional speakers so the pedestrian can hear the song while walking along the Google offices building, and it the LED facade will play the video synchronized with the music. Also, the pedestrian will be rewarded a 1-year free subscription to the YouTube Music platform as an incentive to take part in the game.

The installation is designed as an interactive installation with two LED tactile screens to interact with the users, several media boxes to control the audio output, a 4.1 indoor sound system, several directional speakers, a low resolution LED facade formed by RGB LED stripes for outdoor use and a computer to control the interface and coordinate all systems.

Low res LED RGB Facade with installation 100m2 ($200,000)

3 Panphonic Directional Speakers ($5,000)

4.1 Sound System ($1,500)

2 Media Box ($1,000)

Computer and router ($1,500)

Outdoor and indoor installation ($13,000)

Interface design ($18,000)

TOTAL COST $240,000