NYC Health: It Affects Everyone
The Problem: Drug abuse is often communicated through statistics, policies, and headlines, often reducing a deeply human issue into abstract data. As a result, public understanding can feel distant, and the real emotional weight of addiction is often lost in the background noise
The Insight: We rarely engage with artists as individuals. Their stage names have become cultural symbols, often detached from the real people behind them. In doing so, we unintentionally distance ourselves from the vulnerability and humanity of their stories.
The Challenge: On International Day Against Drug Abuse (June 26th), create a cultural intervention that reframes how audiences perceive addiction and its consequences, making the issue feel personal, human, and impossible to ignore.
The Idea: Spotify temporarily transforms the way users encounter select artists who tragically lost their lives to drug abuse by replacing their stage names with their real names across album covers and artist pages. Names such as Malcolm McCormick (Mac Miller), Jarad Anthony Higgins (Juice WRLD), and Gustav Elijah Åhr (Lil Peep) momentarily replace their iconic personas, reframing them not as distant cultural icons, but as real people whose lives were deeply affected by addiction.
The Work: A platform-wide activation on Spotify’s interface that subtly alters artist identity presentation for one day, creating an unexpected moment of reflection within everyday listening behavior and turning passive streaming into active awareness.
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