The archive · Content & Film · Product decision · 2020
Spotify’s Alone With Me builds a deepfake The Weeknd who greets every fan by name
After COVID cancelled his After Hours tour, Spotify gave each fan a private AI session where a deepfake The Weeknd greets them by name and plays the album.
Spotify
What it had to solve
When the pandemic cancelled The Weeknd’s After Hours tour, millions of fans lost the chance to see him. Spotify wanted to give them a connection to the artist from home — and make it feel individual rather than broadcast to everyone at once.
How it works
When the pandemic cancelled The Weeknd’s After Hours tour in 2020, Spotify did not settle for a generic video message. Its answer, Alone With Me, was a personalised microsite: deep-learning technology let each fan have a one-on-one with the artist, at a time when no one could see him in person.
The experience started with The Weeknd personally thanking the user for being a fan, then commenting on their own Spotify data — their name, favourite song, even the year they started listening — before turning into an intimate listening session of After Hours, with visuals shaped around the individual listener. The “performance” was generated from existing footage and voice synthesis, so it could be different for every visitor without The Weeknd filming anything new.
What made it new was that the personalization came from data fans had already generated, so a million sessions could each feel like a private encounter with the artist. The experience was widely covered by music and advertising press and joined the D&AD Awards archive as a reference for how artists could stay close to fans during lockdown.
Why it lands
- The personalization was real, not cosmetic: each session used the user’s name, favourite song and listening start year, so no two encounters were alike.
- It turned a cancellation into owned, one-on-one time with the artist instead of yet another broadcast livestream.
- Deep learning over existing footage and voice let the “performance” scale to every fan without the artist touring or shooting new material.
- The data fans already produced became the emotional hook — an artist who knows your listening history feels like a relationship, not an algorithm.
What it did
Every visitor met a version of The Weeknd that seemed to know them personally, turning a cancelled tour into one-on-one moments rather than another livestream. The experience earned a place in the D&AD Awards archive and was covered worldwide as one of the most visible mainstream uses of deepfake technology by a major artist.
What you can take
When a live event disappears, replace it with something each audience member already owns: the platform’s own listening data lets an artist “know” every fan by name — personal beats broadcast.
Since then
Alone With Me became a reference point for AI-personalised artist experiences as tours stayed cancelled into 2021, and it remains documented in the D&AD Awards archive. The idea of turning each fan’s listening history into a one-to-one moment foreshadowed a wave of generative, data-driven fan experiences in music.
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