REVOLUTIONARY DIGITAL CAMPAIGN ALLOWS FANS TO SHARE MEANINGFUL MOMENTS FROM THEIR LIVES INSTANTLY VIA CONTINUOUS VIDEO STREAM
“LEVEL OF CONCERN” SPENDS SIXTH WEEK AT #1 AT ALTERNATIVE RADIO
JUNE 22, 2020 – 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. Fans can visit https://loc.twentyonepilots.com/ to upload their own footage, which will instantly appear in the “Level of Concern” (Never-Ending Music Video).
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. The concept for the reimagined take developed as Twenty One Pilots went to work on recording a remote performance of “Level of Concern” for The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon: At Home Edition. Theperformance, which is streaming now on The Tonight Show’s YouTube channel, sees each musician delivering an open-air performance while in quarantine. The duo of Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun will be donating a portion of the proceeds from “Level of Concern” to Crew Nation, a global relief fund for live music crews, which aims to help touring and venue crews affected by the Coronavirus pandemic.
“Level of Concern” is the first new music from Twenty One Pilots since the release of their 2018 RIAA platinum-certified LP TRENCH. “TRENCH revels in the confounding genre-blurring and cavernous conceptualism that has defined Twenty One Pilots,” declared Billboard. Upon release Trench made a massive global impact with the RIAA gold certified collection earning the GRAMMY® Award winning duo their biggest sales week ever in the U.S., with 175,000 units sold in its first week. A true global phenomenon having surpassed two billion streams worldwide, TRENCH earned Twenty One Pilots Top 5 chart debuts around the globe including the U.S., U.K., Belgium, Canada, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, and The Netherlands.
TRENCH is highlighted bythe #1 Alternative singles “The Hype,” “Chlorine,” and “Jumpsuit,” the latter of which became the decade’s fastest rising song to reach #1 on Billboard’s “Alternative Songs” chart, and also earned the duo their fourth GRAMMY® nomination (Best Rock Song). TRENCH also features album standouts “Nico And The Niners,” “Levitate,” and “My Blood.”
Last year Twenty One Pilots’ announced that their 2013 LP VESSEL achieved a Gold & Platinum milestone with every individual track from the album receiving Gold, Platinum or Multi-Platinum certification from the RIAA. Twenty One Pilots’ 2015 LP BLURRYFACE was the first album of the digital era to achieve this feat back in 2018, making the duo from Columbus, OH the first artist / group with two albums to reach this landmark achievement.
