Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

Music/Brand Integration & Social Media

This week at Live Nation I am working on a research project that explores how various brands try to tie themselves to a music artist, genre or simply music in general.  Whether this is through sponsorships or simply promoting an artist they like, my job is to find out how they utilize social media to convey this message.

I am currently working with the VP of the Los Angeles Live Nation office for this project.  The first assignment was to create a list of brands that associate themselves with music and grab screen shots from their Twitter/Facebook/etc. showing how they advertise this to their fans/followers.  Ranging from Swarovski and Madonna to Fiat and Jennifer Lopez, any brand seems to have the ability to link themselves to the music world.

Now that I’ve completed the preliminary research for over 80 different brands, my next challenge is to answer 3 critical questions:

  1. What is the consistent pattern/dominant factor amongst artist/brand alignment?
  2. Which 3 brands do it best? Why?
  3. Where is there a pocket a brand can pop in and do something exciting and innovative?

By looking through my research, analyzing the frequency of music-related posts and finding out how effective these posts  are will answer the first two questions.  The hardest part of this assignment lies in question #3.  Because Live Nation offers several music festivals and countless concerts throughout the year, they are always looking for different sponsors and different ways these brands can improve the concert-goers’ experience.  To find something that has never been done before on the sponsorship front will be a task that will take a lot of creativity and hard-thinking.

As for now, back to brainstorming!