Sony Music: Getting closer to Gen Z with always-on digital ethnography

The Challenge

Sony Music's Insight team had quant data telling them what Gen Z audiences liked, but not why. Streaming numbers told one story. Why a particular artist connected, why a genre captured imagination, why a behaviour shifted, that took something else.

Traditional online research communities helped, but always seemed to leave the most important things out. Music is emotional, and the nuance lived in the everyday moments: the song discovery on a walk home, the family negotiation over the smart speaker, the way a TikTok trend moved through a friendship group. None of that surfaced cleanly in a focus group.

Music is such an emotional medium with lots of nuance around discovery and engagement, but those communities always felt like they were missing a lot of richness.

The team wanted to be in the room, or as close to it as digital research allows. Especially with Gen Z fanatics: the heaviest streamers, the most vocal about new artists, the audience whose endorsement carried weight to everyone less engaged than them. If Sony was going to launch and develop new artists well, it had to understand this group properly.

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The Approach

Working with The Mix, Sony's Insight team built Pave: an audience closeness program designed to bring the wider business, not just researchers, into the world of Gen Z fanatics. Digital ethnography sat at the centre of it.

Always-on digital ethnography. Around 30 Gen Z contributors per Pave edition uploaded photos, videos and reflections via Indeemo over six to eight weeks of fieldwork.

Open, flexible diary tasks. Weekly prompts were deliberately loose, letting contributors capture the music moments that mattered to them in their own words rather than answering Sony's questions.

An internal Instagram hub. Sony stakeholders followed contributor posts via an internal Pave Instagram page, which scaled audience closeness from the Insight team out across the business.

Co-created Zines. At the end of each program, contributors and Sony staff came together, in person for Pave 1 and virtually adapted for Pave 2 during lockdown, to co-create a printed Zine reflecting what they'd shared.

Pave 1 focused on Gen Z UK rap fanatics. Pave 2, which launched in early 2020, ran for eight weeks across diverse lockdown experiences, from people finishing university to key workers, and gave Sony a real-time read on shifts the rest of the world was only just catching up to.

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The Results

The most immediate impact was tonal: Sony's Insight team stopped calling participants respondents and started calling them contributors. A small change, but a real one.

We stopped even calling them respondents and started referring to them as contributors instead.

Always-on insight feeding the business in real time. During Pave 2, the team watched TikTok explode through the eyes of their contributors and could ship perspectives, video clips and why framing back to internal stakeholders within days. When questions came up about why a platform was capturing attention, or what kinds of artist livestreams were resonating, the audience closeness panel was already there to answer them.

Stakeholder behaviour change. Members of the Insight team began their workday by checking Indeemo before email, a small habit shift that signals how embedded the program became.

Tangible business actions. Contributor insights about missing the gig experience during lockdown fed into Sony facilitating in-game concerts. Observations about livestream consumption shaped engagement tactics for artists going live on platforms like Instagram.

A program, not a project. Pave 1 became Pave 2, then Pave 3 which focused on representation, with Pave 4 already in planning. Each Zine became an artefact contributors could keep and add to their CV, alongside an ongoing internal repository for the business.