After Sleepy Hallow‘s “2055” went triple platinum four years ago, Sony Music’s gaming-and-music team noticed something about the Jamaican-American rapper’s fans: They were gamers. And not just gamers, but Fortnite players.
According to the label’s internal research, Sleepy Hallow fans are 2.5 times more likely to play Fortnite than the national average and twice as likely to play games overall. “It stuck out,” says Alex Ciccimarro, vp of marketing for Sony-owned RCA Records. “Since then, every campaign we’ve worked on with Sleepy, we’ve tried to incorporate gamers.”
The latest project on this front is “The Hallow Heist,” an April 18 virtual-concert event on Fortnite in which a world designed by Sleepy Hallow with his team, employing Epic Games’ user tools known as Unreal Engine for Fortnite, led players to a new music video for “Girls Like Girls.” Hallow, 25, is a longtime Fortnite player who “came in with a bunch of ideas,” Ciccimarro says. The rapper built “The Hallow Heist” with help from his Winner’s Circle Entertainment managers, plus RCA and Sony Immersive Music Studios.
Since the pandemic, a hit Fortnite experience can help an artist build a massive audience. Travis Scott‘s performance drew more than 12 million players in 2020, and 14.3 million experienced last December’s Remix: The Finale event starring Snoop Dogg, Juice WRLD, Eminem and Ice Spice. The user bases of Fortnite, Roblox and other gaming platforms are so potent for artists that one content producer told Billboard last year: “Just the way every artist has an Instagram account and a TikTok, eventually everyone’s going to have a Roblox presence.” Sony’s team has been especially aggressive in this space, including by arranging a virtual concert last October for British singer-songwriter Myles Smith.
“That intersection of gaming and music is a young-consumer-led trend — which obviously is super-important for us, because they’re so influential in breaking new artists,” says Dennis Kooker, Sony Music’s president of global digital business. “We’ve had a lot of young artists that have grown up playing games and know the space really well and have great creative ideas.”
Brad Spahr, senior vp/general manager of Sony Immersive Music Studios, says the Hallow world-creation team focused on a singular question: “What would Sleepy’s brain look like?” Very purple, as it turns out. In “The Hallow Heist,” the rapper’s avatar wears a puffy purple coat as evil robots armed with lasers put him to sleep, while the rest of the game involves players floating, jumping, zip-lining and racing cars through a futuristic purple cityscape. When they finally succeed, Hallow declares, “What a trip. I’ve got this song stuck in my head. Yep, studio time.” The game ends with a trip to a recording studio, where Hallow debuted his new single “Girls Like Girls.” A music video for the track subsequently came out on April 24 and landed 108,000 YouTube views in the first five days of its release. The track has streamed 1.2 million times overall, according to Luminate.
“He was involved the whole way,” says Spahr, whose Culver City, Calif.-based Sony Music team initially emphasized virtual reality when it started nearly 10 years ago, but now emphasizes Fortnite and Roblox in addition to other projects. “He gave us a lot of reference material — things we could work with to build the framework of a creative concept.”
As with all of the Sony team’s projects, Hallow’s Fortnite activation entailed a complex technology design but a simple idea: Reach gamers where they are. “It’s an ‘If you build it, they will come’ situation,” RCA’s Ciccimarro says. “The community wants to be there, and we just gave them something to do.”
