Emerge

Emerge was Spotify's global battle of the bands — a campaign that ran for several years across the US, Europe, and Latin America, using Spotify's streaming data to surface promising artists before the world knew their names. Over ten weeks, selected artists competed by racking up streams and social media engagement, with the winners earning playlist placement, promotional support, and a genuine career launchpad.

For Spotify, it was a flagship marketing property. For the artists, it was the biggest stage of their lives. For the software underneath, failure wasn't an option in either direction.

Years before Nullwest existed, Dave was the technical and creative force behind Emerge — owning it from concept through global rollout.

He designed the metrics framework the entire competition ran on, then built the systems to power it:

- A social scraping engine parsing Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to detect artist mentions in real time - Database architecture and backend services delivering live scoring updates as the contest unfolded - An interactive front end with animated SVGs that updated dynamically with the data, keeping fans coming back - An AI engagement system that kept the competition dramatic for the full ten weeks (more on that below)

After the campaign's acclaimed US run, Dave traveled to Spotify's European campuses to help local teams replicate and customize Emerge for their own markets — turning a one-off campaign into a repeatable global platform.

Ten weeks is a long time to hold an audience's attention A contest with a runaway leader is a contest nobody watches. Dave studied how reality TV producers sustain tension across a season, then built that thinking into software: an AI-driven score-balancing algorithm that dynamically adjusted standings based on artists' relative performance, keeping every week feel like a close race. The system proved itself when Macklemore entered the competition — his enormous popularity could have ended the suspense in week one, but the algorithm kept audiences engaged and watching to the finish.

Scores have to be live, from data you don't control The competition's heartbeat was engagement data scattered across three social platforms plus Spotify's own streams. Dave's scraping and scoring pipeline pulled it all together into real-time standings — so fans saw the impact of their streams and shares immediately, which is exactly what kept them streaming and sharing.

Build it once, launch it everywhere Spotify didn't want a campaign; it wanted a repeatable one. Dave architected Emerge on top of a custom content management system, so marketing teams in any country could spin up their own edition — adding artists, setting launch dates, and defining regional competition zones — without engineers in the loop. That's the difference between delivering a project and delivering a capability.

A flagship Spotify campaign that ran for years across three continents, powered end-to-end by systems Dave conceived and built. An AI engagement engine that kept audiences hooked for ten-week seasons — even with Macklemore in the field. A CMS-driven platform that let Spotify's global offices launch their own editions independently.

Building a campaign, platform, or product that has to perform in public? Nullwest's founders have been doing it for global brands — Spotify, Vice, Intel — for over a decade. Let's talk about yours.