The Muse Room
Organisation | Aum-i Artistes
My Role | Concept, Brand Strategy, Creative Direction, Community Management
How can we get people who don’t pay for music to buy tickets for a new LIVE gig every weekend?
Background.
The Muse Room was launched during a difficult time for LIVE concerts in Kerala. Kochi’s live performance spaces were disappearing; a crushing combination of regressive policies and politically motivated crackdowns on nightlife had brought the city’s once-bustling live music scene to a screeching halt. Bars other than those in five-star hotels were declared illegal under the new law. Close to 700 bars lost their licenses and performance venues crumbled under the restrictions. Even though the demand for music was high, people were becoming less inclined to pay for its consumption. Aum-i Artistes set out to remedy this disconnect and change minds in a way that demonstrated the unique value of an in-person experience – the sheer magic of discovering an artist, LIVE and up close, and forging a connection that feels far more wondrous than algorithmic recommendations. We wanted to reframe the gig experience by reintroducing the State to a new music culture.
A production company that connects artists, brands and fans, Aum-i Artistes was known to provide premium creative support and talent marketing services to help artists grow their fan base at any stage of their career. So, there was a perfect DNA match for Aum-i to step in and create a new calibre of venues across the country for LIVE, intimate shows featuring iconic musicians alongside emerging talent, and in the process, build a digital content stream around those performances. The business pitch was based on the vision that once the flagship venue takes off and the brand scales, new venues would be added across the country to accompany the release of new content. Creating a cohesion between physical and digital experiences.
Creative insight.
The creative insight for The Muse Room came from a conversation I once had with a comedian who described a venue they loved as ‘a room that’s made for laughs’. There’s something beautiful about an audience sitting down in a room and really connecting with a performer in that way. Where ‘me’ turns to ‘we’ and the numbers grow. So we wanted to take that connection and scale it across many such venues, amplified by our content production expertise, and really fill a gap in the market by recapturing the ‘old days’ of the intimacy and atmosphere of small-venue music shows.
Flipping the gig experience
on its head.
With The Muse Room, we wanted to create a democratised space where new artists are discovered, the biggest names are accessible and unparalleled industry knowledge underpins it all. A niche venue that functions as a shared home to iconic performers as well as emerging artists. This has a twofold effect; fans get to connect with performers on a more meaningful level: by asking questions, or speaking to them during the intervals, bonding with one another, flipping the gig experience on its head a little.
Sentinment to scalable product.
Through a series of rapid strategic and creative sprints, I collaborated with Aum-i’s in-house creative studio to transpose this sentiment into a scalable product, distilling the narrative by focusing on The Muse Room as a new way of experiencing a gig. Our goal was to embody The Muse Room’s character and capture the hearts of the musically savvy and culturally curious.
Preserving the feeling of live and up close was an integral part of the project; every element of the brand designed to feel right there and unmistakably live.
Inside the box.
Building on these ideas, The Muse Room identity references a box-shaped room with a half-open door — inviting you to think ‘inside the box’, but with an open mind — giving a strategic heft and worldview to the brand. It also allows the framing of different moments from the shows, and provides a canvas for the community’s passion and creativity. Seen this way, the box is not just an emblematic and stylish graphic motif, but the space to tell a story. One that speaks to the brand’s openness, adaptability and sense of community. This concept stood out as being uniquely ownable and made the best use of our storytelling expertise through stills, posters and merchandise delivering the brand ethos: The Muse Room as a community that connects artists and audiences through live music. We needed to be a brand that people would choose to interact with, and that desirability would only come from no-holds-barred authenticity.
Exclusive without feeling exclusionary.
All about details.
The Muse Room is all about details, so we were keen to create a suite of assets that nodded to the brand’s broader story: print, radio, digital. I also worked with designers to develop a scalable branding system that could be resized and repurposed to create a variety of publicity material (posters, promos, collectibles) for each gig.
Exclusive without feeling exclusionary.
The Muse Room launch gig featuring Agam’s frontman, Harish Sivaramakrishnan, was promoted across social media, following an exclusive private preview for journalists and VIP influencers (with a strong creative presence resonating with the brand’s niche), resulting in the artist’s most-viewed music video to date (racking up over 12M views on YouTube).
Infinite playlist.
Convincing an audience that naturally gravitates towards streaming for their music consumption to show up for LIVE gigs was a tough nut to crack. However, even while these listeners often turned to the internet for music, we also found that they counted on curated playlists to be the background of their day. Using an iterative, lean production approach and in-house post resources, we powered through an aggressive timeline to release 10 full-length music videos on a YouTube playlist in less than 2 weeks since launch.
‘I was here.’
To reward the community of fans who never missed a show, we created a series of social templates so The Muse Room could give them an extra shout out with free matt-printed 4x6 cards (containing the Artist Bio & a QR code linked to the official Muse Room YouTube channel) and posters featuring candid shots of people in the audience with the tagline ‘I was here’.
The spirit of ‘I was here’ was integrated through the entire brand, creating a connection between The Muse Room and the special post-gig feeling of having been there, experienced that.
A series of high-level photographic principles – Human, Moments, Close up, Details – imbued the brand with a natural, unscripted quality. Small touches like this turned the experience of going to The Muse Room into a community building activity. Regular guests were often eager to be featured as Superfans who made their own card galleries and bespoke playlists of performance videos.
Word of mouth was key. We learned a lesson that if something’s good, then people will share it. It was exciting to see this community evolve over time.
Create a space where music matters.
In addition to social, we also designed a custom poster series featuring fans from each show that were then put on display at the venue. Further amplifying buzz around the event, prominent national media houses such as The Hindu and Scroll went on to feature The Muse Room as the next big thing, bringing people together to create a space where music matters.
Impact.
The campaign sparked remarkable levels of interest and intent, including a boost in brand affinity, consideration, unaided recall, and ticket purchase. Over the course of a year, The Muse Room ended up posting 118 performance videos with a subscriber base of 108K across YouTube & other socials, generating over 75.8M video views on YouTube, 2M impressions on Facebook, and 30.7k total POS clicks to Book My Show (ticketing partner).
By connecting with the audience on the devices they use for downtime and play, the campaign went beyond standard media tactics to drive deeper success.
Genius next door.
The Muse Room was essentially an extension of Aum-i Artistes’ longstanding efforts to inspire the fledgling independent music scene in Kerala by proving it’s actively listening. With this venture, we opened several new avenues of engagement for artistes and creators across the country (Trivandrum, Bangalore, Mumbai), further ascending the company’s stature as a talent marketing powerhouse into the cultural consciousness.
It was an exciting time to be a creative agency, with viewers’ appetite higher than ever for quality content, and I’m grateful that I got a chance to be part of such a definitive model for non-traditional concerts in which two or three independent artists play brief, often acoustic sets to an attentive, invested audience in small, intimate spaces where music is kept front and centre and there is no bar noise (no alcohol, no smartphone).
These little details of emotional distinction came together to shape gig outings that felt distinct and friendly. Artists and guests alike were able to share their love of great music without pretence, distractions or large crowds. Creating this brand took a closely coordinated effort utilizing almost every capability in the agency, from strategy and design to production and roll-out.
We gave The Muse Room an authentic voice, the opportunity to support artistes on a whole new level, and an impetus to build a new market around cosy, intimate, room-sized gigs: the closest thing to genius next door.