© AOQ 2026
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How can you immerse teams in regional scenes and musical subcultures when they cannot travel?
In 2023, Spotify's teams were grounded. Layoffs and travel bans had cut them off from the scenes and subcultures they needed to understand, and the gap between what was happening on the ground and what landed on their desks was growing. AOQ was brought in to close it, chosen for our ability to get close to the hard to reach and come up with formats that could make culture feel real without anyone boarding a plane.
Over three years, we ran four research projects across Brazil, Sub-Saharan Africa, North America and Spain, tapping into our network of community leaders and cultural insiders to access voices that don't show up in trend reports. Through large-scale screening, online interviews and IRL ethnographies, we mapped how youth culture is lived: in personal spaces, daily rituals, playlists, group chats and collective celebrations. Alongside each project, AOQ built a global editorial team of journalists, documentarians and creators who turned what the researchers found into original cultural storytelling.
Sound Report: a first-of-its-kind interactive platform built for Spotify's internal teams, combining deep research with over 40 original cultural stories, from sonic maps and community profiles to longform think-pieces. Internal teams could navigate insights or dive into the editorial library depending on what they needed: social pulled stories for campaigns, strategy used it to explore emerging scenes, marketing built partnerships from it.
Spotify
AOQ/001/009/013
Sound Report
How can you immerse teams in regional scenes and musical subcultures when they cannot travel?
© Ask One Question 2026
Contact Us
How can you immerse teams in regional scenes and musical subcultures when they cannot travel?
In 2023, Spotify's teams were grounded. Layoffs and travel bans had cut them off from the scenes and subcultures they needed to understand, and the gap between what was happening on the ground and what landed on their desks was growing. AOQ was brought in to close it, chosen for our ability to get close to the hard to reach and come up with formats that could make culture feel real without anyone boarding a plane.
Over three years, we ran four research projects across Brazil, Sub-Saharan Africa, North America and Spain, tapping into our network of community leaders and cultural insiders to access voices that don't show up in trend reports. Through large-scale screening, online interviews and IRL ethnographies, we mapped how youth culture is lived: in personal spaces, daily rituals, playlists, group chats and collective celebrations. Alongside each project, AOQ built a global editorial team of journalists, documentarians and creators who turned what the researchers found into original cultural storytelling.
Sound Report: a first-of-its-kind interactive platform built for Spotify's internal teams, combining deep research with over 40 original cultural stories, from sonic maps and community profiles to longform think-pieces. Internal teams could navigate insights or dive into the editorial library depending on what they needed: social pulled stories for campaigns, strategy used it to explore emerging scenes, marketing built partnerships from it.
Spotify
AOQ/001/009/013
Sound Report
How can you immerse teams in regional scenes and musical subcultures when they cannot travel?
© Ask One Question 2026
Contact Us
How can you immerse teams in regional scenes and musical subcultures when they cannot travel?
In 2023, Spotify's teams were grounded. Layoffs and travel bans had cut them off from the scenes and subcultures they needed to understand, and the gap between what was happening on the ground and what landed on their desks was growing. AOQ was brought in to close it, chosen for our ability to get close to the hard to reach and come up with formats that could make culture feel real without anyone boarding a plane.
Over three years, we ran four research projects across Brazil, Sub-Saharan Africa, North America and Spain, tapping into our network of community leaders and cultural insiders to access voices that don't show up in trend reports. Through large-scale screening, online interviews and IRL ethnographies, we mapped how youth culture is lived: in personal spaces, daily rituals, playlists, group chats and collective celebrations. Alongside each project, AOQ built a global editorial team of journalists, documentarians and creators who turned what the researchers found into original cultural storytelling.
Sound Report: a first-of-its-kind interactive platform built for Spotify's internal teams, combining deep research with over 40 original cultural stories, from sonic maps and community profiles to longform think-pieces. Internal teams could navigate insights or dive into the editorial library depending on what they needed: social pulled stories for campaigns, strategy used it to explore emerging scenes, marketing built partnerships from it.
Spotify
AOQ/001/009/013
Sound Report