A DIY collective rewrites the rules of music promotion

Most artists follow the same formula: release a track, drop a music video, and blast clips on social media. Tamango doesn’t do formulas.

The Turin, Italy-based creative collective made up of musicians, filmmakers, designers, engineers, and visual artists has never been interested in cookie-cutter promotion. Instead, they eschewed industry norms and built a handcrafted digital experience that feels as intentional as their music. 

For their latest project, they converted a spoken-word recording from a live concert into an interactive web experience. The recording was a poetic manifesto of their collective values, something they wanted fans to feel, not just hear. 

Rather than throwing a YouTube link into the void, they built a scrolling story where handcrafted illustrations and typography animate in sync with the performance. 

“We don’t like to rely on standard promotion,” says filmmaker and animator Luca Giraudo. “We wanted to explore different ways of communicating music, and Rive allowed us to do that.”

Choosing the right tool

Tamango started out using Lottie, a popular animation format for the web, but quickly ran into limitations. They needed something more responsive, something that could handle scroll-based interaction, scale across devices, and support hundreds of layered, hand-crafted assets without slowing down. 

“Lottie wasn’t really what we were looking for,” Luca explains. “A friend recommended Rive, and when we saw what it could do, we decided to fully dive in.”

Rive’s strengths aligned with what they needed: smooth scroll-driven playback, a lightweight runtime, and flexible support for real-time graphics across devices and in-app browsers. With 90% of traffic coming from mobile, the experience had to work inside in-app browsers like Instagram’s. That made it possible to turn a poetic manifesto into a fully interactive experience, one that felt alive, intentional, and completely theirs.

Building a handcrafted digital performance

Tamango merged analog artistry with modern animation techniques. 

Their process:

1. Every frame was drawn by hand, including paper-cut letters, illustrations, and stop-motion elements. 

2. The team mapped out the entire sequence in a spreadsheet, assigning different sections to different artists. 

3. Assets were imported into Rive, where they used nested artboards, frame quantization, and lightweight vector techniques to animate everything. 

4. Using GSAP and Rive’s low-level APIs, they tied animation playback directly to user scrolling, making fans an active part of the performance. 

“The scrolling interaction was everything,” says software engineer Arya Houshmand. “We wanted fans to feel like they were part of the experience, actively engaging with the story rather than passively watching.”

Optimizing for encore-worthy performance

Tamango’s three-and-a-half-minute frame-by-frame animation taught them how to optimize for Rive’s web runtime.

“We had hundreds of images,” says Davide, one of the developers. “We compressed them as much as possible, but keeping performance smooth was challenging.”

They reached out to Rive for help, and one of our developers, Lance Snider, walked them through optimization tricks.

Key techniques:

1. Using Rive’s out-of-band asset system to load assets on demand instead of bundling everything at once

2. Preloading the first third of assets before it began eliminated startup lag

3. Hiding offscreen elements to reduce rendering load and breaking up large images into smaller, memory-friendly chunks

4. Resizing images to powers of two (1024x1024px, etc.) to align with web runtime memory management for smoother performance.

“What impressed me most is that they didn’t scale back their vision. They just kept learning and experimenting until it worked,” says Lance from Rive. 

The result was a fully interactive 50MB website— smaller than a compressed video file of the same experience.

A web experience that rivaled a YouTube drop

Despite the challenges of driving traffic to a custom web experience, the interactive animation was neck and neck with their YouTube release engagement numbers for the first wave of the release.

“We were honestly surprised,” Luca admits. “We thought fewer people would visit the web experience, but the numbers were nearly identical.”

Beyond the numbers, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Fans loved the interactivity.  Developers and designers reached out to ask how it was made. 

Best of all? Nothing crashed. 

“That’s always good feedback,” jokes Davide.

Tamango’s creative future with Rive

The collective sees interactive storytelling as a core part of their future. 

“This type of experience lets us showcase our music, our message, and our visual identity in a way that feels authentic to us,” says co-founder Manfredi Maida.

While they don’t have an immediate Rive project lined up, it’s now firmly in their creative toolkit. 

“With what we know now, we’ll introduce even more interactivity in the future,” Luca says. “We don’t like relying on pre-made solutions. We like to craft our own.”

Lessons from Tamango

1. Push the web runtime, but optimize wisely. Use preloading, out-of-band assets, and hidden element optimizations to keep performance smooth.

2. Make users part of the experience. Scroll-driven animation made this project more than a passive animation. 

3. Collaborate across disciplines. Bringing together developers, filmmakers, and designers helped them create something no one else had. 

4. Think beyond traditional promotion. A custom-built experience helped them cut through the noise of music marketing.

Tamango’s work proves that music promotion doesn’t have to follow a formula to be successful. It’s also a testament to the power of creativity, community, and code, and Rive is the tool that helped bring it all together. 

Want to build an interactive experience? 

Try Rive for free and start designing graphics that make users want to engage.