Building a Music Strategy.

Most companies spend money on music. Few know if they are getting their money's worth.

A brand licenses a song for €100,000. It signs an artist for a separate sum. It sponsors a live event on top. Three different agencies handle the three transactions. Nobody asks whether the three should work together.

This is not a creative failure. It is a commercial one.

Music can sell products. It can change what people think of a brand. It can open a door into a culture the brand could never enter on its own. But only when someone chooses it for a reason.

The mistake is starting with the music

Too often, the film is nearly finished before anyone thinks about the soundtrack. The agency calls the music supervisor and says: find something that works.

That is the wrong order of operations.

The right question is not "what song should we use?" It is "what do we need music to do for this brand?"

Do you want to matter to a younger audience? Enter a new market? Separate yourself from a competitor who looks and sounds just like you? Answer that first. The music comes after.

What I learned working for Miller Beer

At Miller, I curated a roster that included Grimes, Justice, Cassius, Beth Ditto and Chromeo.

I was not building an impressive list. I was solving a problem: what could Miller credibly stand for inside music culture, and who could help it get there?

Justice gave the brand a hard electronic identity. Grimes gave it something stranger and more forward-looking. Cassius connected it to French dance music. Chromeo and Beth Ditto each brought their own audience and their own following.

Five very different artists. One deliberate strategy.

Nobody has to sound the same for the plan to work. Every choice simply has to make sense.

Followers are not the same as influence

An artist with five million followers is not automatically a better investment than one with 300,000.

If those five million people have never cared about your brand and never will, you have paid a large fee to talk to the wrong room.

The smaller artist may carry real weight with the audience you are actually trying to reach.

That is the asset a brand cannot buy outright: a relationship an artist has spent years earning with their audience. Attention. Trust. A place inside a culture.

Buy into that relationship and it is worth more than any famous face standing next to your logo.

A partnership should make something

I distrust any partnership whose main output is a press release.

Ask one question before you sign: what will we get that we could not have got alone? New customers. A new market. Content. Credibility. Distribution.

If nobody in the room can answer that clearly, the deal is not ready.

The relationship outlasts the event

Brands spend heavily on a live moment, then treat the job as finished when the artist walks off stage. That wastes most of the value they paid for.

A single performance can produce footage, social content, photography, interviews and further partnerships. The relationship should keep working long after the night is over.

Sync works the same way. A song licensed for a campaign is not simply a production cost. Handled well, it can become the one thing people remember about the film.

At Light On, we have worked across brand campaigns, artist partnerships and sync, including placing Spiller's "Groovejet" in the film Solo. The commercial mechanics differ every time. The principle never does: the music has to earn its place.

Rights are strategy, not paperwork

This is where money quietly disappears.

You find the right song, then discover the licence does not cover the territories you need. You sign an artist, but never negotiated the content rights the campaign actually depends on. You commission original music for one film and never ask whether it could serve the brand for years. You pay an artist to show up, then have no plan for the relationship afterwards.

None of this shows up to the consumer. All of it shows up on the balance sheet.

Decide the rights, the content and the distribution before you commit the fee, not after.

The best strategy compounds

One good partnership leads to the next. An artist opens the door to a new audience. The content built around that partnership travels further than the original event ever could. The next campaign is more recognisable because of the last one. Another market opens.

That is how music builds a brand, not through one celebrity moment, but through a sequence of decisions that reinforce each other.

The goal is to build an asset. Not to keep buying isolated moments and calling each one a strategy.

The biggest name is rarely the right answer

The safest choice is usually the biggest artist you can afford. It is rarely the smartest one.

I would rather put €50,000 behind the right artist for the right audience than €500,000 behind someone famous for no reason connected to the brand.

The difference is not the size of the cheque. It is the thinking that produced it.

Put music in the plan, not at the end

Music should be decided when the campaign is conceived, not bolted on the week before it airs. The same goes for artist partnerships, sync and licensing. Treat them as separate expenses, and they cost you. Treat them as one plan, and they compound.

This is the work we do at Light On: building music strategy, curating artist partnerships, supervising music, and managing sync and licensing so that every pound spent on music does more than the last.

The question is not whether your brand spends enough on music.

The question is whether the money you already spend is working.