Callin’ Hall & Oates & Lamb of God: Creative Music Marketing With Twilio’s Telephony API

Twilio new hire Michael Selvidge and buddy Reid Butler recently created "Callin' Oates", an "emergency Hall & Oates helpline" powered by Twilio. The app provides a number to call in order to listen to one of a choice of Hall & Oates tunes. It's been so wildly popular that they gotten approval from Hall & Oates and now they've added a web version. Callin' Oats was created for fun over a weekend, and only scratches the surface of what artists and music marketers could be doing with free or low cost VOIP and related services such as those provided by Twilio.

Callin' Oates started out as a phone number and a Twilio app that got a lot of attention from a NY Times reporter's tweet in mid-December. It's gone on to become a website that's also powered by Twilio, a tech startup providing "infrastructure APIs for businesses to build scalable, reliable voice and text messaging apps."

Callin' Oates was a project by a new Twilio employee and a friend that shared the music of Hall & Oates and demonstrated some of Twilio's technology. Hall & Oates have responded favorably so it's a definite media win for Twilio and likely for Hall & Oates as well.

Twilio is the main company I've seen pursuing some of the potential of VOIP, essentially voice and related multimedia phone services via the Internet, for music services:

Twilio's case studies include a marketing effort by Sony Music and Lamb of God that resulted in a "viral phone and SMS campaign named 'logjam', which utilizes Twilio to make phone calls with recordings from the band members promoting their new album and providing a sample of their music."

Twilio had an oversized presence at Music Hack Day Boston where a number of hacks featured Twilio APIs.

Previous music projects using Twilio include SongVoodoo, Callaboraoke and HoldMusic.

For the most part, music efforts employing Twilio have been of the Music Hack Day variety, displaying a great deal of creativity without need for market readiness. Sony Music's marketing for Lamb of God features relatively mundane usage of some of Twilio's basic services that nonetheless requires a high quality of service and dependability. I think there's definitely a great deal of potential for using Twilio not only as a service provider for traditional marketing efforts but as a platform for building music apps that could take a more creative approach to sharing music for both artistic and business purposes.

Ready to get started? Cocreator Reid Butler is sharing the story of how they built Callin' Oates on his new blog Exploring Twilio.

Hypebot Features Writer Clyde Smith maintains his freelance writing hub at Flux Research and blogs at All World Dance and This Business of Blogging. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.