Twenty One Pilots have released the first-ever, never-ending music video with the help of their fans. Livestreaming now on YouTube.
Twenty One Pilots have released the first-ever, never-ending music video with the help of their fans. Livestreaming now on YouTube, the groundbreaking video for Twenty One Pilots’ hit “Level of Concern” pulls in fan created content, in real time, live on YouTube. Powered by Imposium, every three minutes and forty seconds a new music video is created and streamed live to YouTube, containing brand new content from fans. Conceived by the band with award-winning storyteller and director Jason Zada, the concept behind the innovative digital campaign was to find a unique way to connect with fans during the pandemic, and give them an opportunity to share meaningful moments from their lives via the continuous video stream.
Twenty One Pilots cryptically launched the project on June 12th with a 24hr livestream on their YouTube channel featuring a TV screen flashing mysterious imagery. Three million people tuned into the live broadcast with #twentyonepilots trending on Twitter for twelve hours, with over 150k tweets from the dedicated fans. From the stream fans were directed to https://usb.twentyonepilots.com/, the landing page of a complex and immersive Alternate Reality Game (ARG), which Zada developed with renowned game designer, Steve Peters. The goal of the ARG was to find a total of 20 codes, each one unlocking a virtual USB drive through which fans could download a zip file containing: images, videos, and symbols taken from the band’s personal phones – clues to deciphering the remaining codes needed to solve the game. Each drive contained elements leading to the next puzzle and each code became increasingly harder to solve as the ARG progressed. One code was hidden in the closed-captioning of the official “Level of Concern” music video, whereas another was hidden in the spectrogram of an audio file. Extremely elaborate in nature, one clue was concealed within a glitched photo file, that when opened in a text editing program contained coordinates to locations around the world. Inputting these coordinates into Google Maps let fans piece together another code. Serving as the centerpiece of the video launch, upon solving all 20 codes of the ARG fans unlocked a secondary page where they were able to upload their own unique content to the official never-ending “Level of Concern” music video.
Written and recorded amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, “Level of Concern” is currently sitting atop the Alternative Radio charts for a sixth straight week and has amassed 150 million streams around the globe. Originally released alongside an official music video directed by longtime collaborator Real Beer Media, Twenty One Pilots have also shared “Level of Concern” (live from outside), an alternate version of “Level of Concern,” featuring additional performances from friends and collaborators Paul Meany (Mutemath), Jesse Blum (MisterWives), and Simon Jefferis.