How Music Grows Brands (eBook)

Chapter Two. 
Why Music?

Audiences Are Choosing Music More than Ever

Audiences today have more choice and control over how they allocate their attention than ever before. Some people actually go as far as calling it the attention economy. If viewers aren’t engaged by ads, they will avoid, skip, or block them. YouTube made it common to skip ads, but even the timer countdown can frustrate viewers enough to leave a negative impact on the experience. When skip functions are not enough, many are making the move to paid subscription models on platforms like Netflix or Spotify to avoid the ads. Imagine spending all that money creating an ad that people pay to avoid. Ad avoidance in general is gaining popularity, with about 40 to 50 percent of people around the world using some form of ad blocker. These are broad-scope examples; however, for specific customer segments, even larger percentages of the audience may be working hard to dodge the content funded by your hard-earned marketing budget. Technology that filters what gets our attention is only becoming more common.

Evidence clearly points to people choosing music in more moments, across more devices, throughout their day. When Spotify was first gaining traction, founder Daniel Ek said that his goal was to make it easier and more convenient for people to access music. He has, and it keeps getting easier. Voice devices like Echo, Google Home, and HomePod share one thing in common: music is their number-one use case. People ask these devices to play songs or playlists. We’ll dig more into how to leverage this in marketing later in this book.

The love is there. The attention is there. Music is a massive passion point across audiences. Music in marketing and brand building isn’t a new, shiny object, however. We’re not trying to show you something that’s never been done before here. Music has helped build brands for over a hundred years, maybe longer, and throughout that time, best practices have emerged that we can apply to new initiatives. As the world evolves, music evolves with it, giving brands a constant flow of innovation, inspiration, and access to culture—if they invest in a proper understanding of it.

Music Is Social Currency

We like Reid Hoffman’s definition: trust equals consistency over time. The same can be said for anything that has value that must be earned. Culture isn’t created in one moment. Credibility and relevance don’t happen in a single instant through one action or moment. They can’t be rushed or bought. Your brand achieves cultural relevance and credibility through consistency and dedication over time.

The cultural and storytelling impact of music is indisputable. Early blues songs told stories and encapsulated experiences that became a connective tissue, and large segments of the population embraced it. Early rock ’n’ roll sparked a rebellion. Little Richard and Chuck Berry paved the way for NWA. The Sex Pistols brought the tensions of youth to mainstream attention. Late ’90s Britpop battles captured and galvanized the mood of a nation. And let’s not forget all the “unifying,” largely celebrity-led cover songs that emerged from the first COVID-19 lockdown.

The delivery and technological advances of music also impacted culture.

A century ago, broadcast radio began to emerge. The 1920s saw a growth in the number of stations and the power of those stations to reach a national audience. As a delivery medium, American radio worked to reduce ethnic and racial divisions by bringing music and culture into every home. Sadly, institutional conservatism and racism in the US fueled a resistance to this and kept it from coming to full fruition. The shortsighted and biased resistance to radio dramatically slowed the potential understanding and interconnectivity of cultures and people that it could have delivered. It would take a long time before Alan Freed, the famed disc jockey, would break the norm and play the original, un-whitewashed versions of songs by the original Black artists. Even decades after the advent of radio, Alan Freed was met with strong resistance, and it took many more years for him to break through.

For most people growing up in the ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s, music shaped their personal identity and had a big impact on which friends became part of their group. Music genres created social tribes.

Music trends and fashion were inseparable. Run-DMC’s meaningful personal relationship with Adidas spawned its own song, “My Adidas.” The group wasn’t commissioned or asked by Adidas to write this song. They just felt that Adidas was connected to who they were, and like any group, they sang about what they knew and loved.

Fashion also identifies with musical movements. We can’t think of grunge without the plaid shirt tied around the waist or punk without leather vests and safety pins. While Joe is adamant these trends never caught on with him because he was more of a Michael Jackson red jacket kind of guy, Rebecca’s teenage years were encapsulated almost entirely by Doc Martens and tie-dye, soundtracked by Nirvana and REM, with the omnipresent smell of incense.

Whatever the era, style, or movement, music still shapes and defines culture. Music artists truly impact popular culture and create trends, and media companies and brands always try to be the first to follow those trends.

Effects of Music on Health, Well-Being, Retention, and Attention

The power of music hits us as humans on emotional, biological, and neurological levels. Music is a tool that has accompanied our evolutionary journey and provided a sense of comfort and social connection for millennia.

Music activates the regions of the brain responsible for attention, decision-making, mood, and memory. In addition, music has a positive impact on physical and emotional health by improving workouts, easing pain, helping to access better sleep, reducing stress, relieving symptoms of depression, improving cognitive performance, and providing social connection.

This positive state of mind and body should be very intriguing to marketers looking to create resonance, consideration, and retention of messages—and a similar sentiment around their brand. Imagine inserting your brand into these positive neurological experiences. The possibilities are endless.

So, how does music contribute to an active, engaged audience?

We are taught to understand our brains in an oversimplified way: the left side is creative, while the right side is analytical. We know now that there are many regions of the brain that handle various functions and actions. Beyond the release of “happy hormones,” music and sound are also unique in that they light up several regions of the brain on both the left and right sides as we quickly and subconsciously process individual pieces of information and put them together. There are deep evolutionary sonic triggers for fight-or-flight, and some countries legally regulate these frequencies, including sounds such as the fire engine siren. A substantial sector of society suffers from selective sound sensitivity syndrome, or misophonia, and experiences heightened emotion or distress to sounds other people find harmless. We are all affected by sound in different ways.

This might be part of the reason music can trigger such vivid and specific memories. Memories of a moment in time, the person you were with, and the location become stamped onto a sound or song.

We articulate music’s effect as emotional, which is true. But emotion is only part of it. Studies of the brain and music reveal music’s impact on attention, focus, association, retention, inclusion, and mood. In some contexts, listening to certain music can actually release dopamine, acting like an antidepressant.

In early 2021, a team of social neuroscientists from Bar-Ilan University and the University of Chicago launched a study into the effects on the brain when people made and listened to music together rather than individually. Their study was inspired by the creative efforts of people around the world producing music together while social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. These efforts included people singing songs in unison from balcony to balcony, groups singing on video conferencing platforms such as Zoom, and celebrities such as Chris Martin of Coldplay, Norah Jones, and, of course, Gal Gadot, putting on living-room concerts.

The research revealed that when people sing or listen to music together:

• Oxytocin, the “love hormone” that contributes to our feeling of being socially bonded, is secreted.
• Dopamine, a neurotransmitter that produces a sense of pleasure and is pivotal for our sense of reward and motivation, is released.
• Cortisol, a hormone that contributes to stress, is decreased.

It’s not just experiencing music together, however. Sad music can release prolactin, which is the soothing hormone released when a mother nurses a baby. The effects of music are biological and physical, and they’re far-reaching, lighting up every region of the brain in a fireworks show.

Music can even affect other senses. A 2005 Nature article describes a patient associating certain musical intervals with taste sensations like sour, bitter, salty, and sweet. Synesthesia, or the condition where different senses are interconnected, can also tie musical notes together with colors.

So, what does this mean for us as marketers? It’s simple,...