American Airlines’ In-Flight Indie Music Experiment Pays off in Social Media Love

American Airlines has revealed that its Indie music selection, available inflight and played to passengers as they board the aircraft has resulted in a seven-fold increase in positive Tweets about the airline in the first week of May.

The airline’s Director of Inflight Entertainment & Connectivity, Brian Richardson, reports that since its introduction, the Indie music selection has made a significant positive impact on American’s passengers and that love of music is clearly transforming into a love of the brand in measurable ways on Twitter.

Is @AmericanAir's music director available for parties? Washed Out, Real Estate & Wild Nothing piped in on the plane speakers pre-flight = ?

— Lindsay L Miller (@lindsaylmiller) April 20, 2015

So there I was on @AmericanAir just landed at JFK and @JackPenate "Pull My Heart Away" comes on on the plane. Nice Surprise.

— Pat Byrne (@PatByrned) May 5, 2015

.@AmericanAir the music has gotten better. No more sad piano version of U2. I do appreciate that.

— Juan Manuel Rótulo (@Rotulin) April 28, 2015

“We looked at going with music that’s popular, but you run into a situation where you’re catching popular songs at the tail end of their cycle, or playing music everyone has heard enough already,” he tells us. “We spent some time with different types of music and realized that alternative Indie music is something they’e not heard before and set the right tone when you board the plane and deplane. Now we’re introducing a lot of people to new music that they want on their playlist.”

Brian also told us that American Airlines intends to improve the cabin harmony by being the first airline to introduce the new Bose Quiet Comfort 25 (QC25) noise-canceling headphones on its Premium cabins flying to Europe, Asia, and Latin America very soon.

American’s playlist can be found below:

March: Boarding playlist

March: Arriving playlist