PaulMcCartney.com goes to Primavera

One of the best things about working at PaulMcCartney.com is that you never know where you may end up next...

Over recent months, we've been lucky enough to watch Paul from the side of the stage in front of 50,000 fans. This was just weeks after seeing him play two intimate concerts to a few hundred competition winners at BBC radio's Maida Vale studios, watching an impromptu concert which brought Covent Garden to a standstill, and finding ourselves high in the clouds of London's skyline at The Shard for a live streamed interview with Zane Lowe.

Our latest adventure? We have just got back from Barcelona where we were invited to talk at Primavera Pro. If you're unfamiliar with Primavera, it's a music festival in Barcelona that takes over the whole city. The 'Pro' part is where the music industry gathers to share their thoughts and ideas.

We were invited along to the festival to discuss Paul's work with the Japanese-based messaging app LINE. Many of you may already be familiar with Paul's account on LINE as he now has over 11,000,000 followers around the world!

Another exciting thing about working for Paul is that he constantly challenges us to come up with new methods of communicating with his fans, and using technology in interesting and pioneering ways. This means we spend a good deal of our day with thinking caps on and doing research into cool new technologies.

We decided to work with LINE as we were looking for a way to communicate with Paul's fans during the Japan leg of his 'Out There' tour, his first visit to the country in 11 years. We set up Paul's account in English and Japanese and wanted to create something really special to celebrate the tour, but what to do?

We racked our brains and remembered a conversation we had with Paul in August. In the lead up to the release of NEW, Paul kindly invited PaulMcCartney.com and a handful of others to his house in New York to discuss his album (see what we mean when we say we're never sure where we may end up!). During that visit, we got talking about messaging stickers and how they can be used in private messages on apps like LINE. Paul was excited by the idea of us creating some.

So we spoke with LINE and they were great in helping us to get the stickers designed. Below is one that was very popular with Paul's fans.

Following the launch in October, the success of Paul's LINE account was incredible! After just a few weeks he had attracted around 3 million followers. We were happy it was doing so well but when Paul flew to Japan the following month for his tour that's when things started getting really crazy.

The 'Out There' tour included shows in Osaka, Fukuoka and Tokyo and Paul's stickers were appearing everywhere in the crowds; on t-shirts, on flags, on paper fans. By the end of his visit Paul had over 9,500,000 followers on LINE! A few weeks later Paul passed the 10,000,000 mark, the first musician on LINE to reach that figure.

And this brings us back to our trip to Barcelona. Paul's success on LINE was getting noticed within the music industry and we were receiving countless phone calls and emails asking about his work with them. The Primavera Pro invitation was to discuss messaging apps and what they described as Paul's “phenomenal success” with LINE.

Recently we expanded on Paul's account by adding him to LINE PLAY. Again, you may have seen us posting about this on PaulMcCartney.com.

LINE PLAY is an avatar communication app where players can come together to chat with friends. They can also visit the 'rooms' of celebrities and collect personalised “Gacha” items such as Paul's guitars, magic piano and stage suits. Once again LINE were great with their help and when Paul's page launched 15,000,000 players worldwide were told about it resulting in Paul receiving over 1,000,000 'Loves' (the game's version of 'likes') in the first days.

Have you already joined Paul on LINE? If you have, let us know what you think in the comments below. If you haven’t, you can download the app today on iOS by clicking HERE! or Android HERE!  and download LINE PLAY by clicking HERE!

All the best!

PaulMcCartney.com

PS – Because Paul is always coming up with new ideas and looking to do exciting things online, we know for sure there will be a great many more cool things coming your way in future so remember to keep checking back to PaulMcCartney.com!