On the Thursday before Foals released ‘Holy Fire’ we staged a very different online album playback.

Rather than supplying a media partner with an on-demand player widget, we live streamed the album playback on the home page of foals.co.uk.

Sam Stubbings came up with the genius idea of streaming a real vinyl playback of the album. He and Yoni Lappin spent the evening filming the record spin on a turntable in the old chapel or a derelict mental asylum in Peckham while Miles Tudor from ELS made sure the footage was broadcast smoothly. The album played back three times and then disappeared forever.

I built a splash lightbox to appear on the website just before the stream started. The video player included sharing buttons to promote the stream on Facebook and Twitter as well as a link to pre-order the album.

I used fancybox to launch the lightbox pop-up and the afterLoad function enabled me to add the additional buttons relatively easily.

We only announced the stream 2 hours before it happened but news spread very fast. #HolyFirePlayback was already trending on Twitter by the time the second song started.

The playback worked particularly well because the atmospheric sound of the chapel reduced the chances of the stream being ripped and fans were all listening to the album at the same time.

The two and a half hour campaign resulted in the highest traffic to the band’s site ever as well as a high conversion of fans clicking through to pre-order the album, making it a huge success.