Should You Partner With A Musician?

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1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

1:59You've probably heard all you ever want to hear about influencer marketing. It exists, it can be really useful. You know that it's a weird crapshoot. Is this influencer going to actually reach your intended audience? Are they going to make good content? What do they cost? Did you spend too much? All that stuff. But here's something that you probably haven't heard. It was something that I hadn't spent much time thinking about, which is musicians as influencers. It's an untapped market. They aren't being reached out to in that capacity. That's Jesse, a rare person who does reach out to them in that capacity.

2:32My name is Jesse Kay. I'm the CEO of New Agency and also the editor-in-chief of the influential music newsletter Beats and Bytes. And that New Agency is spelled N-U-E Agency. Jesse and I met through a mutual friend many years ago and stayed in touch as he developed this fantastic career in the musician marketing space, which is to say that he connects brands with musicians for marketing campaigns. And he's usually doing this at a very large scale, large brands, large musicians. But he was telling me recently that this is something available to anybody because, of course, there are also smaller musicians who still have incredibly loyal followings and, very importantly, are not usually hearing from brands.

3:22You come to an artist and you say, hey, here's the opportunity. I want to elevate your music. I want to help create music with you. I want to help you do something with music, with my brand. That becomes a marketing boom or a cosign for an artist that's very helpful. But to succeed, you can't just approach a musician the way that you would approach an influencer and hope for the same kind of deals and structures. It's a little different. You have to understand the nuances of the people that you're working with. And Jesse is a guy who does because he's been around the scene. I was throwing events in high school and fell in love with music and started realizing that music was making my parties better and was making deeper connections with my friends.

4:08I went to college, studied business, and then realized you could be in the business of music and interned and worked my way through the kind of system. And when I was 22, I worked at a boutique talent agency and I signed a group called Clips. And they went to number two on the pop chart. Pharrell was producing them. And I learned so much about the artist representation space. And as I was working with artists, I started meeting with all these brands and started to realize that after about 10 years of representing artists, it was a lot more interesting, a lot more fulfilling, a lot more creative to be connecting brands to culture and really leveraging the power of music and musicians.

4:54So what I do now is a culture marketing agency that sits at the intersection of entertainment, technology and brand partnerships. So I said, Jesse, why don't you come on Problem Solvers and let's talk through this. Let's talk about music, marketing, and why it is a undervalued asset and why it is something that more brands should consider. So that's the conversation that you're going to hear today on Problem Solvers coming up after the break. All right, we're back today. I'm talking with Jesse Kay, founder of New agency about how anybody, including perhaps you, can use music and musicians in your marketing.

5:35And let's just let's start at the beginning here. Jesse had told me that this is something that is available to more than just big brands. We can all picture big brands like Pepsi working with the largest artists in the world. But he's saying, no, no, this is available to everybody. Everybody should be thinking about that. And so I said, take me into it. There are a lot of opportunities for brands that are just starting out or passionate about culture to figure out how to leverage culture or utilize it to be able to connect. So I would say the way you would do that if I was a small brand is the same way I would do it as a large brand, but just at a different scale.

6:17I would look for collaborations. I would try to find like-minded brands or artists or influencers to connect with and to cross-pollinate with to grow audience. I would pop up at events, even if it's a local flea market, whatever it is to touch people and to sell product. I would connect with influencers and seed product. I would give out product to folks, doesn't have to be on a huge scale, but that you think audience would appreciate this, that you think would appreciate your product. And there's just a lot more ways to do it if you're a small brand or an emerging brand when it comes to culture.

6:59It's just really about their appetite and wanting to do it. What do you think founders should be thinking about in terms of who to work with? And I'll give you an example. let's say that I have a vegan cupcake brand. Well, I might think, all right, the influencers that I want to work with should just be vegan influencers, like whoever's in the vegan influencer space, of which I'm sure there's many. That's also a narrow band. What's so interesting about culture marketing and the work that you do is that sometimes these collaborations don't seem all that obvious, but they work anyway. And I'm curious how you think through how to pair the right brand with the right person and therefore what a small brand owner can be thinking about as they try to find that partner for themselves.

7:56So let's take the example of a vegan cupcake brand. Sure. Who do they want to sell to? Who is their audience, right? They really need to understand who they are and where they want to go so that we can figure out what vehicles will get them there. So if they're looking to sell in a certain market, if they're looking to sell to a certain demographic, if they're looking to sell to a certain geographic location, all of those are super important to understand. Sometimes you do a scattered approach. Really, you don't know who your clients are going to be. So you touch a couple different demographics, test and learn, put it out in the world and see what comes back.

8:38But there's great ways to connect with different audiences. And sure, there's social media, there's storytelling on social, there's paid media. But really, music is such a passion point of consumers and of founders. And it's a great connection point. So if a brand marketer or an entrepreneur is trying to figure out how to connect to their audience, they can really figure out how to use the power of music, that emotional connection point to or an influencer or a creator and figure out who they want to reach and how they want to reach it and then tailor and target the message to that. So let's dig into like how you do that with music.

9:30I think it's interesting because you play in a space that I don't know that enough people think about when they think about who to partner with. I think about influencers, I think about influencers, but I don't always think about musicians. Tell me what people are missing with that opportunity. Music is such an effective marketing vehicle. You do not have to. Pepsi is looking for the halftime show performer. The definition of Pepsi's emerging brand artists are very different than what a early company could consider emerging. There are millions of artists right now. There are so many different musicians and creatives that can be tapped and would be excited to be tapped.

10:17In the similar vein to the influencer world, it's just that musicians are the ultimate influencers or ultimate creators. They're making poetry. They're making music. Their music can travel. They've got great distribution. They've got fan bases. Their fan bases are passionate. They're creating content and then they're traveling with that content and touring it and promoting it. It's just a very different philosophy than what an influencer would be on social media. Music is just this universal language. Music can transcend language. It can transcend boundaries. Also, music is this great connector.

11:01People might not like fashion. People might not like sports. Not everybody's a foodie, but everybody can relate to and connect to the power of music. So when you look at music, it's this great kind of vehicle for marketing, and it's really undertapped, especially by emerging brands. You don't have to spend Pepsi money to partner with an up-and-coming artist, to seed product to that artist, to maybe support that artist in a certain way if on tour or to create content with that artist. Even licensing music. If you're not going for a major big artist, if you're connecting with an independent artist, you could get music from that artist.

11:43You could use it in your commercial. You could create music with that artist, a jingle of sorts, and have a really impactful emotional connection with your consumers, especially if you curate it the right way. So I think it's really about having a conscious effort to connect with music and realizing that music is an undervalued marketing asset for brands, no matter big or small. Okay, I want to, the past two answers that you've given me give me two things that I want to ask you almost in parallel, even though they're current. So let me just say them and then we'll take them in part. Number one was that you had made this really useful point about how the way to think about who you partner with is to think about who you want to reach.

12:31And the consumers of cultural output, they like shake out differently than you might expect. So if I go back to the vegan cupcake brand, the vegan cupcake brand obviously wants to reach people who are vegan. so the narrow band to be thinking about would be like, okay, who are the vegan influencers that share vegan recipes? And now we're talking vegan and it's all, but who are your vegan consumers and what kind of culture do they consume? And therefore what culture makers are making that culture is a completely different way of reaching them. So question number one is, how do you engineer that insight?

13:14That's what I'd really love to know. If I'm the vegan cupcake maker, then how do I figure out which artist is producing music that my target consumer is consuming? That's a hard thing to track. And I'd be curious for your insights in it. The second thing that I want to talk about next is I want to know what it looks like in terms of output to be working with musicians. You had laid out a couple scenarios there, collaborating on a song, licensing music. but let's dig in a little more specifically so that people can like really tangibly understand it. So the first one is track for me how I can figure out, okay, who is my consumer?

13:52And therefore, what are their consumption habits in culture, which feel far away from me as just making cupcakes? So you wanna know who your consumer is. The way you do that is just deep dive. What's the demographic? What's the region, right? Are you targeting a local region for cupcakes or are you trying to be in 15 cities or are you in just one or two locations? And then you're gonna look at what artists are local to that area and then the values of those artists, which you can find the demographic, the details. It takes a little bit of digging, but it's a really savvy way to market with influencers and creators.

14:34So I think what you'd wanna do is just boil down who your audience is or who your consumer is and then start to Google artists with those type of qualities. And you'll pull up or you could look on Instagram. You could look on TikTok. You can look on Google search. You can just check different kind of local artists' networks. And I think you'll pretty quickly find these are artists that fit that demo, vegan social media artists with under 10 ,000 followers, those type of things. And then what you want to do is come up with the story that you want to tell about your brand. And that could be, it could be a social media alignment, right?

15:22Once you've found the artist, you either want to have a conversation with that artist or you want to think about, okay, I want to tell this vegan cupcake story to folks that like strawberry cupcakes. and I want to tell it in Atlanta and I want to find an artist that likes strawberries in Atlanta that also connects to being vegan. And these information will be out there. Once you find those type of artists or once you get closer to the potential of who you want to work with, then the strategy is what story do you want to tell? Do you just want to amplify that artist? Hey, come to our restaurant.

16:03And we want to give you a platform to tell that story. And that's the beauty of social media. All it takes is some really compelling storytelling. And then you can either put paid behind it or not. And you can have that artist posted so you're in front of their audience. And then you can post it in front of your audience. And it could resonate that way because it's a passion point. So I would take the approach of creating social media content with that artist or having that artist create social media content and tag you accordingly. And then once the artist has the brief and that's being created and that's starting to move, then you can figure out what works and either amplify it with more paid media or strategic media spends, or you could maybe do more content with that artist or have that artist make a playlist for your store or look for other vegan artists and come up with a playlist of all of these vegan songs or vegan artists that exist already.

17:06You could probably search all of these interesting vegan cupcake songs or vegan songs and pull them into a playlist. And you could just use Spotify's technology, come up with a nice looking graphic and put it out. And you probably could tag those artists and say, hey, I made a playlist for my store. Or you might even get organic reposts from the artists. So I think anything you can do to help build an artist's brand and reputation is going to be good for that artist and probably excite them enough to also share the information or be intrigued that they'll see it and a conversation happens and a conversation happens in public.

17:49That actually could be great content, too. Yeah, it's funny. As you were talking, I just figured I'd see what would happen. but I went to ChatGPT and I typed, name 20 up-and-coming musicians who are vegan. And I listed out a bunch that maybe people know these names. I don't, but I'm also like an old guy now who doesn't follow pop culture. But we got a PBD Gray. Jesse, you've ever heard of PBD Gray, known as the vegan rapper? We've got a DOM, Dominique Side, Houston-based entrepreneur and musical artist known as Vegan Bay. And then, although that it's funny because if you scroll down a little further, then it tells you about some up-and-coming artists named Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus.

18:29Obviously, ChatGPT has some work to do there. But what this got me thinking was, part of the premise of the conversation here was that this is an overlooked opportunity for brands. I wonder if that also means that musicians are, at least at the up-and-coming level, feeling overlooked themselves. Are they not getting as many brand deals as maybe a traditional influencer would? And therefore, is this a kind of unique way to stand out And also it's cost effective because the musicians are happy for the deals. What do you generally see out there? Initially, musicians were not so encouraging to doing brand deals.

19:07It was not necessarily part of the DNA of how the music business was working or at least making the majority of their revenue. That changed. And that's changed significantly over the past 10 years, let's say even five years after the pandemic, when the world stopped, artists became a lot more open to doing these partnerships. But it also has been happening when record labels stopped supporting artists touring. It's just all of a sudden the zeitgeist switched and all of a sudden artists' partnerships became a great cosign or a value add to the artist's career. So artists are now more open to it, but not necessarily in the same marketplace as these influencer networks or these kind of software programs.

19:50So it does require a little bit of learning. It does require a little bit of them being reached out to because they're not necessarily available in like the traditional influencer world, but they are way more impactful and they're way more creative and it's way more authentic. It's not like a pay for play influencer situation. A lot of artists don't get a majority of these deal flow, like you said. So it is an undervalued area. So if you come to an artist and you say, hey, here's the opportunity. I want to elevate your music. I want to help create music with you. I want to help you do something with music, with my brand.

20:27That becomes a marketing boom or a cosign for an artist that's very helpful. And they aren't being reached out to in that capacity. So I think that you're going to see a lot more artists excited and you're going to get more mileage out of an artist than a traditional influencer that's job is to basically post from brands. That's not their job. Their job is to make music. Yeah, it's an interesting point. Like the days of being called a sellout from like the 90s for anybody really, that's long gone, right? It's so long gone that it's hard to even conjure up how it made sense for people to be upset by that in the 90s.

21:06But they were, anyone who's old enough, they'll remember. But yeah, but still, it's not like a musician is just cranking out sponsored posts every day. So what you're saying is you have to approach it from the thinking of how does this feel really organic to the artist's work? And how do you collaborate with them more on it? It comes off so much better because even the audience and the fans will appreciate the authenticity. It's not just the, hey, whoever, if$250, first 10 that respond with nice eyebrows, get the gig. Like we're doing some intentional strategic partnerships where you can connect with emerging artists and really have impact to them.

21:49It's not selling out. Now, a co-sign with a brand in a lot of ways means they're legit or selling in. And it's like a collaboration with another artist. It's almost like a remix of sorts with their content and with a brand. So artists enjoy, as long as it's not hurting the integrity of their art. Yeah. A lot of artists want this additional press lift, this additional marketing opportunity, this additional revenue stream. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Songs, they don't pay for themselves. Not often. All right, let's bring all this to life because you had sent me, before we started recording, you'd sent me a recent campaign that you had put together for this outdoor gear brand marketing with some artists.

22:39Take me into that. Set up what it is and maybe what the original intention and the brief was and how you ended up drawing the line to artists. So a brand named Cotopoxy, which initially was a concept. It was a mission before it was even a product. This is a brand that was created really with the intention to make the world a better place. And they'd figure out what to sell once they really got behind this kind of goal. So they reached out to me, an executive on the team. They're not a huge brand by any means. They're not small, but they're definitely not Fortune 500, Fortune 100. They're a consumer lifestyle brand.

23:24And they said, we feel like with what we're doing, music will really help us tell our story and make it come to life with a deeper connection point with our consumers. Our consumers are a fun loving bunch of outdoor folks. So how do we do that? Where should we play? And what my company does is a comprehensive strategy where we understand the brand, we deep dive into the opportunities in the landscape, we come up with kind of a dossier or a report of where they could play best in music, which is what we call a music strategy with a lot of different touch points. It could be live music festivals.

24:09It could be collaborating with artists on posts. It could be a merch line for an artist for a specific event. It could be seeding products. It could be product placement in music videos. There's just a lot of different conversations to be had, but where can they be most effective? And really, it was around coming up with a concept called Music for Good, which is aligned with the brand's unique promise that they want to make the world a better place. They're a gear for good brand. They're interested in doing good. So building this brand extension was really a natural fit. But what artists could we find or who could we align with that for a relatively small brand or a smallish brand could be able to tell their stories?

25:04And so we came up with a unique vision, which is to support artists that are making the world a better place. And instead of sponsoring those artists, per se, they sponsored those artists' missions and supported those artists' missions by amplifying their message and by donating to their mission and by creating this content. So they aligned with different artists where what was paramount was the mission. And so that was a different type of marketing technique where the mission was the star. And they found artists or we found artists that echoed their audience, but then put them into new rooms.

25:44We partnered with a Venezuelan refugee called Danny Ocean. And we're really good at finding what's next. And when you do a chat, GBT search like that, there's probably a couple of needles in the haystack. But we're also having different methods to find what the right artist would be. Danny Ocean was this artist on the rise. a Venezuelan, came from Venezuela, is mission-driven when it comes to supporting migrants in Venezuela and donating his music. And so what we did is we did a partnership that kind of amplified his story. He came over with just a backpack and a microphone, Cotopaxi sells backpacks, and we amplified a backpack release with that partnership.

26:24And then we did something really think global, but act local with an artist named Tiara Wack, super colorful, super vibrant. And we helped her story of supporting Philadelphia's education and music system with the brand. And by telling this kind of bringing this story to life where she supported a young producer, she met her for the first time, we put it in a music studio, filmed it, and it just got a ton of eyeballs for the brand. It was a great press story. We ended up in Billboard. We ended up in Complex Magazine. We ended up getting millions of impressions for the artists and the brand, just places where Codepoxy wouldn't normally be.

27:08And also, it just drove traffic to the website. It got the whole industry talking about it. Other artists and artist teams have started reaching out saying, hey, we want you to tell our story. We want you to tell our message. Just more and more people gravitating towards the brand. And the brand is thinking about this as not just a one-off or a campaign, which it could be, but more is how do we do more with artists and really turn music for good into an extension of what we stand for, which is a gear for good product. so that was a lot of fun that came out in September and October and yeah it was a little bit of a sprint but we've done two so far and it came off really credible really authentic and really just a different way to support artists and partnerships yeah that's awesome and it sounds like very aligned with that advice that you were giving earlier about figuring out how to do something that feels organic and authentic to what the artist is already doing as an artist.

28:16So you're finding artists in this case that already have some kind of mission. There's something that they're already doing. And so this brand can now help participate in that rather than ask the artist to just go shill their product, which wouldn't register to the artist's fans because the artists themselves wouldn't really seem authentic in doing it. That's right. It takes a little bit of nuance. It takes some connective tissue. It takes some understanding, but it's so impactful. And I'm just a big believer that artists sets the trends and that if you want to shift culture, music is the lowest barrier entry to shifting culture.

28:58And when you shift culture, all of these KPIs and passion points start to, when you shift culture, you get the business results, but you also get more rabid consumers and a deeper following and connection. Yeah, that's awesome. Hey, Jesse, if people wanted to reach out to you, how would they do that? I am at Jesse K on Instagram and X. And then also I'm a top voice on LinkedIn. in. So I'm pretty easy to find there. And also I do a weekly newsletter called Beats and Bytes that breaks down everything happening in the intersection of music, technology and brand partnerships. So that's a great place to start to learn the ins and outs of the business.