https://www.nme.com/news/all-the-young/62885

All the Young’s online promo person, Alex Fordham, secured an exclusive pre-release stream for their debut album on NME.com.

To make the most of the promo opportunity I built a custom player widget powered by a Soundcloud secret set. I used Lee Martin’s Premiere app as a base (the same way I did for Smiler) and made a number of modifications to make it suit our needs perfectly.

I removed various elements to keep the app in a tight space and make it easily embeddable. I also opened it up so the packshot is always to the left of the playlist.

I added a pause button which proved to be a fairly extensive task. The pause button needed to detect the current song, pause it and then disappear while making the play button reappear. I had to reconfigure the play button so that it continued the paused song rather than restarting the entire playlist.

I made a number of style changes including a background image that displays a loading message while the player loads all the tracks from Soundcloud.

Finally I added some retailer logos linking directly to the pre-order pages for the album on Play.com, HMV, Amazon and iTunes.

The widget got great exposure on NME.com, generating a significant number of Soundcloud plays and album pre-orders.