Outpost PR MD David Silverman Writes For Music Week

Fresh from announcing Faithless’ groundbreaking new partnership with Fiat, Outpost Media’s David Silverman considers how best to gel a relationship between brand and band that benefits both parties.


As music and brands becoming increasingly entwined with each other, critics have debated the right formula for a brand and band collaboration.

The bands we are talking about here are generally the big music ‘brands’ of our day – the Duffy’s and The Florence’s and the brand ‘investors’ in music like Coca-Cola and Impulse. What we are starting to see at the moment is a trend which encourages a closer relationship in the creative process as illustrated by the recent Faithless and Fiat partnership.

One of the key areas to look at is alignment. A brand can enhance their image by association with another brand of equal footing in another industry. This gives them the opportunity to market to each others audience, including any cross over, while enhancing the credibility of their own brand to their existing audience in the process.

The issue comes down to creativity - building and marketing a product is a different type of creation, but creation is what it is. The key is to match up that creativity with an artist that has the same creative values.

Who are their fans? What is the demographic of those fans? What are the key elements of the artists sound and what is their reputation? These are all questions that need to be worked through. Choosing the right artist to work with becomes a question of believability: is it trustworthy, does it make sense - are consumers going to believe this partnership.

Many critics of the brand / music tie in would note that a certain artist has appeared to ‘sell out’ but making sure the partnership is believable goes someway to stopping this happening.

Overt criticism of these types of deal display a lack of knowledge and understanding of how difficult it is for artists to put records out these days. The brand sells drinks, the band sells music. Artists have customers too – it’s just that they are called ‘fans’.

As record labels focus more and more on back catalogue, sign more artists to spend less time on each, a new generation of record label is emerging: one that is more of a partnership than the traditional record label model. It’s just that no one thought that someone who invented a fizzy pop drink a hundred years ago would end up being the saviour of the music industry.

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