Rebecca Jolly: Episode 1098

Transcript

[0:00:26] RJ1: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Author Hour. My name is Ricky Jump and I’m your host today, talking to authors Joe Belliotti and Rebecca Jolly about their forthcoming book, How Music Grows Brands. In How Music Grows Brands, Joe and Rebecca provide an insider look at utilizing music as your most powerful branding asset. They introduce BranDB, their proprietary methodology, reveal the secrets of the industry and provide a roadmap for long-term success. This is actually the first resource of its kind and it’s an empowering exploration of the power and potential music has to shape culture and drive business. I had a blast talking to Joe and Rebecca today. They are both industry leaders at the intersection of music brands and technology. Joe was the head of global music at the Coca-Cola Company and he’s also been named multiple times on the Billboard power list and in the Billboard branding power players report. Rebecca, equivalently a powerhouse. She is currently managing director at a media network in the UK and her work has been featured in Billboard, Entrepreneur and Music Week. So no big deal. They both do such a good job in this book at laying out for brands and marketers, how to incorporate music into your overall branding strategy. They take a really big idea and make it very easy, especially with BranDB and I can’t wait for you to hear our conversation today. It ranges from everything from what are MySpace songs were to how to actually employ music in a really powerful way and why it connects people to moments and to brands so poignantly. So I hope you enjoy. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Author Hour. I am your host for the day, Ricky Jump and I am here with Rebecca Jolly and Joe Belliotti, co-authors of How Music Grows Brands. Rebecca, Joe, so excited to have you on today, how are you both?

[0:02:23] Rebecca Jolly: Good, thank you. We’re good, thank you. Yeah, it’s good to be here, thanks for having us.

[0:02:28] RJ1: Yes, I’m so excited to have you both back. I know that I talked to you originally in 2021 when the book was certainly not a fledgling idea for the both of you but just bringing it to life is what we were talking about. So very excited to see it come full circle and Rebecca, I know that you are all around the world all the time, where are we finding you today?

[0:02:49] Rebecca Jolly: So, I’m just outside London today.

[0:02:52] RJ1: Okay, beautiful and Joe, where are we finding you?

[0:02:55] Rebecca Jolly: I am in Los Angeles.

[0:02:56] RJ1: All right, beautiful. Well, I am here in rainy Austin, Texas. I’m jealous of the both of you but very excited to talk about your forthcoming book, How Music Grows Brands. I just have to complement you. It is so good, I feel like anyone would really enjoy reading it but obviously, more focused on brands and how they can use music, which is just very cool and timely all around. Really rich content in there, the book looks good. I encourage everyone to pick it up at their earliest convenience but let’s start by giving our listeners an idea of both of your personal backgrounds, Rebecca, if you want to start?

[0:03:35] Rebecca Jolly: Sure. So I’ve been working in and around the kind of brand and music and entertainment space for around 20 years now between London and CEOs in the US in New York for 10 years and also in Amsterdam and I’ve kind of I’ve worked from brand agency side, through to entertainment company, through to music media company and all the while, kind of at that intersection of brands and music and understanding how to connect to brands with an audience through music essentially and the power that that can bring to both parties. And it’s kind of — it was actually, whilst I was working in that space that actually Joe and I have had a few sliding doors moments and cross paths. We’re kind of accidentally working on a few similar campaigns. We both worked on a campaign that was connecting Spotify and Coca-Cola, about 12 years ago in a partnership and then again, we kind of crossed paths whilst I was working at SFX entertainment and Coca-Cola where Joe was, which he’ll talk about, was in partnership, potentially in partnership with some of the festivals that we were working on. So that’s going to be my background. Back and forth between those and then Joe and I came together again about two or three years ago to work on a project and found ourselves middle of COVID, lots to talk about when it came to brands and music and decided eventually to kind of put pen to paper. Joe had this great idea for a book that would actually be the book that we all had wished that we’d had when we were kind of figuring out our way in the brand and music space and we haven’t got our heads together and started writing it when we were… have the benefit of lots of time in our hands during lockdown.

[0:05:11] RJ1: Amazing. Well, a beautiful partnership that came out of COVID I must say, knowing that the partnership obviously already existed but coming together for the book, it’s a pretty magical result. Joe, what about your personal background?

[0:05:24] Rebecca Jolly: Yeah, so I grew up loving music, you know, played in bands when I was in high school but I wasn’t very good. I met one of those people who was actually really good in saying they weren’t good, I really wasn’t very good. So I went to a music college, went to Berkeley College of Music because I wanted to get into the music industry, ended up working in music publishing at a company called Maverick. At the time, it was owned by Madonna and Warner Brothers. Then I got into music for film and TV because I like the idea of putting, you know, music to pictures to visuals and then I got into music for advertising and helping brands and advertising agencies by music and artist partners and thought, that was really interesting and moved to New York, started an agency with a friend of mine who managed a lot of Hip Hop artists. He managed 50 Cent, Diddy, LLCoolJ, Busta Rhymes and we started going out to brands and helping them connect with pop culture through music. Coca-Cola became a client of ours, we became the music agency for Coca Cola and then in 2010, I joined Coke full-time as the head of global music. I did that for eight years, setup all the strategies, artist partnerships, as Rebecca mentioned, the partnership we had with Spotify, then left and still stayed in the intersection of music and brands. Joined a company called Song Trader, a music tech company and yeah and then as Rebecca mentioned, you know, we’ve crossed paths quite a bit, you know, throughout the years and then sat down and just started you know, figuring out how we take the experiences that we’ve had, the things that we’ve seen, some of the thinking we’ve applied to our jobs over the years and put it into an actionable format in this book.

[0:06:58] RJ1: Incredible, sounds like a very boring run for the both of you, I have to say. I really — I can’t imagine a more fun profession to find yourself in for either of you and then for the two of you to come together with this ideology and layout, Joe, exactly like you said, a really practical step-by-step guide essentially for you know, how brands can grow their brand through music and what drives that. It's a fascinating read. Joe, you saying that you weren’t so good at music. I did read further along in the book that your children are practicing a lot of musical instruments today and I just have to ask, are you okay?

[0:07:41] Rebecca Jolly: My son, Max, everything from like making beats on computers to playing clarinet, guitar, drums, he’s only 11 but you know what? I think it just speaks to the fact that you know, music is just so interesting and so you know, attractive to people of all ages, right? I mean, I think we get into music when we’re so young and it never leaves us, it becomes part of our life, it becomes part of our identity, it becomes, you know, really, such a strong passion point.

[0:08:08] RJ1: You’re not in the camp then of the parents who are ready to tear their, I mean, tear their hair out because of the drums going on in the garage but I guess that’s the benefit of having you as a father. So you find yourself in the more enjoyable side of that camp, which is great.

[0:08:25] Rebecca Jolly: Yeah, I think I’m the one that’s tearing their hair out because at the moment, whether it’s movie soundtracks or various different instruments or singing. I mean, my kids are the same, equally as passionate about music as I was. But yeah, it’s the kind of key part for them at the moment is volume, apparently.

[0:08:45] RJ1: Amazing. Yes, at the time that you wrote the book, I know that Rebecca, you said that your kids were a bit too young to be getting into that and now we’re seeing you years later and seeing you on the other side of that camp or the tearing out your hair camp.

[0:09:00] Rebecca Jolly: Well and truly discovered it, which is great and I embrace every single part of it, we could just sometimes do it and we’re lowering the volume just a bit. I was the same, always just so passionate about music, also not very good at it myself but then similar to Joe, I carved my own path in it, knowing that it was always something that I wanted to work in just because there’s nothing like it, kind of really, ignite some kind of passion or emotion or sentiment in any way. I think everybody feels that and it’s why we both kind of knew that this was a career that we wanted to pursue, really.

[0:09:35] RJ1: Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s amazing that your children have you kind of in that ideology that it is important and you know exactly how important that is, so you’re able to foster that within them. Certainly something that I’m sure we all wish that we had at that age but speaking of you writing the book at a different time and, you know, as you were writing the book, you were in COVID. You didn’t necessarily know what the musical landscape was going to look like today, how brands were going to be able to utilize music today, what live music was going to look like today. So I’d love to just kind of, if both of you could make a blanket statement on how the world has shifted since you were in the throes of writing the book and if COVID and the consequences or the reality today has majorly shifted any of the ideology in the book.

[0:10:27] Rebecca Jolly: Music has been part of brand marketing for decades, for over a century, you know, brands have been using jingles and using music in their ads and even advertising on radio. So music is nothing new, I think that you know, the ways we engage with music and consume music always change. But the fact is, you know, music is a passion point as it ever was and you know, when you look at brands, they invest quite a bit in sports and influencer marketing and all these things to help drive their business and they don’t invest as much in music and we think it’s because they don’t have the capabilities. They don’t have the strategies and they don’t have the internal teams to help then navigate music, the passion of music to drive their business and that’s why we wrote the book but if you look at today, I mean arguably, music is as important as ever. If you look at TikTok, TikTok is you know, so unique in the fact that it’s a sound on platform, unlike you know, Facebook and Twitter and Instagram where you know, people engage with that content and they don’t, you know listen to it. They can just read it. That’s not the case for TikTok. 96% of the users on TikTok listen to the content. So music becomes really important on that platform, we see how many artist and songs are breaking and you know, becoming viral or people are rediscovering songs from the past. You know, such a musical platform and brands could take advantage of that by thinking strategically about how they use music on TikTok. So the ways we engage always changes, the fact that music is part of it hasn’t changed for over a hundred years. Yeah and I mean, just to build on that for my side, looking back at the moment, we decided to start writing this book, I always very much, Joe and I both end up in the same wheels but from slightly different approaches, from slightly different angles and I think at the time I was consulting with quite a number of different music brands. Whether it was Beatport or whether it was Wax Poetics or Soho Radio and I’d actually kind of taken on a load of new clients who are in this position where they were really, really struggling. Because COVID, the pandemic had completely decimated their business like, the live element had pulled the rug out of a lot of the artist they’re working with, which it just had such a knock on effect in terms of the marketing, the ability to create music and so that was kind of the world that I was in most at that time when Joe and I got our heads together and started doing it and my kind of thought in this space and how we could apply it in this book was that the music is a such a connecting tissue through everything that we do. It touches ever parts of everyone’s lives and the world doesn’t exist in the same way or operate in the same way without the music that we’re so used to and you know, for decades and decades and decades, brands have been using music as in all the ways Joe mentioned, for their marketing, for everything that they’ve done and so at this point, the music scene was really in a bit of a crunch point. My kind of sentiment very much at that time was that there was almost a kind of duty of care that brands owed to the music industry. You know, is this a time for brands to really kind of pivot a lot of what they had been doing, a lot of them were kind of in fire fighting mode but I really start to invest back into the music scene that they had borrowed from and utilized so much. So those that you will see through the book that where we talk about the evolution of music marketing and all the different elements of it and how brands can really use it to drive all the different parts of their business but how that also was then kind of more crucial than ever at this time and you know, you referenced earlier that we started writing it in 2021 and we’re kind of about 18 months on but none of that has really changed. Things are starting to rebuild, they’re still lots of areas that need support and that brands can really help with and that was… and we’ve kind of listed actually a lot of different ways that a brand can really build campaigns that help evolve the industry and so much of it is across some of the digital platforms that Joe talks about but there’s lots of other areas as well. So I think our kind of heads come in together at that time, was actually a really fruitful time in terms of taking everything that we’d, all our decades of experience in that space and figuring out what that meant now and how to navigate the whole industry and I’ve seen what went with it for a kind of greater good as well as brand marketing efficiencies and success but also to be able to drive the industry, which is such a powerful industry, under invested in, typically how to drive that forward.

[0:14:57] RJ1: Amazing. Yeah and you say that it’s under-invested in, what you do highlight in your book and just the reticence of brands to really embrace music as a big marketing tool or driver because they can’t necessarily see immediate outcomes or can’t easily identify what it’s doing and it does seem or I would assume that they’re a bit more open to that conversation now with the rise of TikTok and then Joe, what you said that being a 96% of audience has the sound on while they’re scrolling through that platform. So along those lines, how can a brand identify what music or song is relevant to their DNA? Can you dive a little bit more into that as you cover it in the book?

[0:15:41] Rebecca Jolly: Yeah, I think that you're right. You know, brands do have a hard time measuring music mainly because it’s something they don’t currently measure, right? And I think if they put a little bit of attention into taking some of the metrics and some of the KPIs they build for other forms of marketing and apply into music, they’ll see that they can start to really understand, you know, how music is performing and how it’s driving the business. So you do see you know, music working for brands, you know, very, very effectively but just not at the scale that we think it could be, you know? That you know, I think every brand has the opportunity, whether you’re a major brand or you know, an emerging brand, to use music to help you connect into culture, to cut through the clutter and to really drive your business.

[0:16:26] RJ1: How is it that a brand does identify what music is relevant to their DNA? You do say that the idea of music genres is antiquated, which I love being a person who’s Spotify wrap makes me look like a crazy person at times but how do they really tap into because the idea of genres is antiquated? First of all, can you explain just more to the audience what you mean by that and then how does a brand kind of embrace that idea to say, “Okay, we’re not looking at a particular genre, we’re looking at what resonates with our audience in the moment.”

[0:17:01] Rebecca Jolly: Well, I think this is an area that is definitely getting more sophisticated. I think we both worked in a lot of spaces where a brand has kind of a lack — usually of kind of internal strategy and music strategy team. The tendency is being to stick their brand to the biggest artist that they can think of and pay a huge amount of money for it and not really get the breathe of what the right music alignment can offer for their brand. And I think that that model is evolving and through the work that lots of people similar to us and doing in terms of kind of demonstrating every different facets of music that can align with a brand and how it can play out, I think that the ability to align with one specific genre, as we talk about, is definitely evolving as well because that’s not how people consume music. You just absolutely kind of summed but up in your reference to Spotify Wrapped, you know? It used to be very much like, what kind of music are you into and someone will be into rock or someone will be into EDM and brands would replicate that. But our consumption patterns have completely changed and with that, so has the need of a brand to align with music in the same way that the audience does. I think Joe, you probably have kind of a more detail around this as well in terms of the kind of dissolving of genres. That’s exactly right. I mean, I think you know, people today, you know, you could go to a 21 Pilots concert and you could listen to Jay-Z on the way in and [inaudible] on the way. There is no sense of you know, genres for people. It’s really about how music helps enhance their experience, whether it’s you know, an everyday experience versus special experience. And I think when you look at it in terms of brands, you know, Coca Cola for example, you know, the product is a drink. It’s a sparkling soda but the brand is something that’s just intangible, it’s emotional, it lives in your head, it’s a feeling that you have. So it’s about taking that feeling of you know, a brand and figuring out how do you marry that with music? What are the attributes, what are the DNA characteristics that you can pick out from a brand and attach them to music and try to bring that music experience and that brand experience together and that’s really where the magic happens is when you align that brand experience, the music experience and you connect with your audience and it sounds very intangible and we try to make it more tangible in the book. When you're starting with, like I said, brand that is just this emotional construct, you know, it actually becomes pretty easy because you have music, which is this intangible emotional construct and you’re just kind of you know, figuring out how to marry the two.

[0:19:32] RJ1: That’s beautiful. I love the idea of brands thinking more about music as a feeling rather than a genre and at whatever given, you know, point in time in that particular marketing initiative saying, “What do we want our audience to feel in this moment?” And kind of building around that. In regards to performance enhancement, you know, we’re talking about music and branding as a whole and how powerful it can be, you dive into this in your book. What are some of the things music initiatives can drive in terms of results and marketing?

[0:20:07] Rebecca Jolly: Music can really do anything a brand needs it to do. So if you are trying to launch a new product line or a new campaign, attaching music gives you more attention. If you are trying to attract consumers on digital properties, music can help you attract more attention to your content. If you are looking to create memorable experiences, music can help you create memorable experiences for your consumers. It is really limitless as to what music can do because music is so much a part of all the different ways we go about our lives, right? From listening to watching music videos on YouTube, to going to events to playing around with music apps, it’s really endless and it really comes down to we talk a lot in the book about this, it’s figuring out like how do you define your picture of success, what are you trying to use music to do for your brand? Then starting from those business objectives and building the strategy based on what you are trying to achieve, that’s the way your brand will find success in music because it will guide you down the right path. It will, to Rebecca’s point, it will help you pick the right artists if that is the right direction. It will help you align with the right event and it will help you create the right content or pick the right song. So it really starts with figuring out, “What am I trying to do as a brand, as a business?” building the strategy that will help me bring it into pop culture. Yeah and I have the real world example, a kind of tangible example of this as well where we, you know, we talked a lot about how aligning a brand with different kinds of music can really drive the brand reputation. It can drive sentiment, it can drive all the different things you wanted to do. It can sometimes be hard though to connect that to sales and that is something that we all want to do as marketers but there’s sometimes a jumping off point. I worked with a brand, I was working for a music company and I was working with a brand, an alcohol brand who were really struggling. They were like a very well-known alcohol brand but they were really struggling to get listed in the cool areas, cooler areas of the US. So Brooklyn and downtown LA, they were not getting those listings in the bars and those areas and kind of did almost and connected to that. We built a big music company for them, we built a huge like months in both of those locations, we built weekly music event that would bring loads of people and it was we recorded it. It was live streamed around the world, great and upcoming artists in tiny little kind of divvy venues and that was the marketing program that we’re running. A couple of months later, the kind of head of the brand of the alcohol company called me up. He was like, “Well, you can believe it, since we have been doing this, we’ve got listings at like almost 50 of the bars that we were just completely unable to before just because our association with this music experience and this locale has completely transformed our reputation into a brand that people want to have as part of their bar, as part of their hospitality offering.” So for me, that was a real moment that showed that we can create all the music campaigns in the world and we know how much good they can do, we know how much emotion they generate but that was a real like shift in brand reputation with a relatively small piece of work and it was a real kind of moment of like it has such impact. If you get the music offering right, it can transform you as a brand.

[0:23:13] RJ1: Excellent and I know Rebecca you give a particularly hilarious and poignant story about and I won’t spoil it for people in the book, they’ll have to read it but about how a car rental brand that you worked out for a festival kind of realized last minute just how much they didn’t want their car rental grid to be affiliated with alcohol and a part of the experience was the zip-line and then having the bar underneath and having alcohol involved and how that didn’t really convert like they wanted it to be because they have to change things up so last minute.

[0:23:46] Rebecca Jolly: I think, we between as we have countless stories of brands who have got it really catastrophically wrong. Their music strategy has been as deep as we should do something in music and then thrown some mud at the wall and everything that we are trying to do with this book is to help brands avoid that, to help them spend their money smartly so it delivers for them but also delivers on the other side of it as well. It delivers for the artist, for the music properties that they are working with because yeah, we have seen our fair share of disastrous campaigns as well.

[0:24:16] RJ1: Yeah and just speaking of those disastrous campaigns, you say something really interesting in the book but I think this question kind of lends itself too but you do say that utilizing music in your brand can be a double-edged sword. So can you talk about both sides of that sword or have we already kind of hit that nail on the head with those two examples of how things can go really well and then really poorly?

[0:24:40] Rebecca Jolly: As with anything, there is a risk that if you don’t do it properly and with the right intentions and with the right strategy and without really putting the thought into what you are trying to achieve but also that really deep thinking into what is going to work with your brand, what it means, there is a real risk of it being called out like you cannot just barge something. You can’t just like decide you want to sponsor something because it is the cool thing to do or because someone else is talking about it. There is so many ways that it can backfire if you don’t do it right and this is why we always throughout the book really trying to make a case for investing as a brand and that person or that team internally who can really help you figure that out because people think on surface level, attaching yourself to a music program in whatever way is a simple thing to do. Pick an artist you like, pick a genre you like and stake your logo on it and it just – unless you do it and align yourself properly and do it for the right reasons, you can get caught up the same way as anything. I mean, it’s not necessarily a music example but who can forget Pepsi and Kendall Jenner, you know? It risk all, the risk of making that mistake if you don’t do it properly and bring in the experts to help you figure out what really will work for your brand and for the industry that you are trying to support. I think that’s spot on, it is really about thinking, you know, how is your audience going to perceive this, right? I think music artist are actually really good at thinking about their audience, right? Because they, you know, music artist is a brand and they think about how their audience is going to perceive a relationship with the brand, you know, to take that into consideration. I think brands need to do the same thing. They have to look at how their audiences or their consumers are going to perceive this campaign or activation or partnership and really think about it through the lens of the audience and what, you know, value they’re going to get, what experience they are going to get out of the initiative. Yeah, that was and just to build on that further actually, that’s a really important point because to think about the actual artist themselves and that they are also a brand and that I think that hopefully lessen these to be – that it used to be very much there’s a tendency for a brand to think that dollars is all that really mattered for a music artist and if they have the money, then why wouldn’t the artist work with them. Actually quite recently I actually got a brief from a pet food company like for anxious pets, would you believe it or not, for anxious cats or dogs who wanted to do something with a music artist and they just couldn’t understand that the music artist was not interested in doing that because that like – what does that say to them as a brand? How does that help them as a brand? And they kept offering more and more money. So we couldn’t say no enough, you know? There has to be that respect and that’s what’s really important for a brand to understand as well is that you have to be bringing something to the table that is added value for the artist you want to work with that really is thoughtful and considers what they are also doing with their own brand and those two brands have to meet in the middle and if they don’t, it’s never going to work.

[0:27:32] RJ1: Yeah, you do a really great job of highlighting in the book. I just want to emphasize again, there is so much meat there and Joe, I do want to hit on a very big portion of the book that you are going to have to talk about in a couple of minutes and everyone is just going to have to read to understand the rest of it but I think that you really hone in well on it’s not just the particular campaign artist, song, playlist that they’ve honed in on. But again, just how our audience going to perceive this especially with a Gen Z audience, they are really good at smelling that out, smelling anything disingenuous and saying, “You know, this is something that doesn’t really fit.” So I really love that you mentioned that and then just because music is so fun and even a very fun book, I do want to get into some fun questions but before we get there, Joe I believe it was your brain child, BranDB, correct me if I am wrong. But you do go through, you know, it is a large portion of the book and you do go through six, kind of what I’ll call pillars, because this is the most actionable part, right? So if you could give us a really brief overview of BranDB, what that is, how to implement it, that would be great.

[0:28:42] Rebecca Jolly: Yeah. I definitely, you know, started the sketch and back when I built it together and you know what we really wanted to do was provide because a lot of the things we talk about, you know, they can feel so conceptual, so how do you ground it in action and we put six steps together and you know eventually, we’ll refine it and maybe get it down to four steps or three steps down the road. But right now, it is the six things you should do when you’re considering music as part of your brand activation and it walks you through some of the decisions you need to make, some of the questions you need to ask yourself and it really is just a guide. It is a strategic guide and when we present how music grows brands to brands, when go into and do whether it’s presentations or sessions within a brand environment to marketers, you know, we talk about the steps. But we also ground all of these in real life examples and we try to do it on the podcast and in the book but it is hard to talk about specific examples.

[0:29:40] RJ1: Moving into some more fun questions because again, you have written a very fun book and we have to wrap up here shortly. You mention that music is the number one signal of personal identity, so I have to ask you both, Rebecca we can start with you, if you had one and if you did, what was your MySpace song?

[0:29:59] Rebecca Jolly: Oh my goodness, that’s going way back. Oh, I actually can’t remember. I thought you were going to ask what was on my Spotify Wrapped, which I was about to get really embarrassed about. I can’t remember what my MySpace song was. I mean, at that time when MySpace is big, I was actually running a lot of – like Joe talks about his entry into music as well being catastrophic when actually playing instruments. I also was and my entry to music was through promoting music nights and that is how I started. I started when I was a student in university and then continued it when I moved down to London and I used to run Punk Nights at a really cool like dive venue in shortage in East London and so I think MySpace and I use MySpace as a tool to promote those nights. So I think my MySpace songs would have been a rotation of like really filthy punky London bands at that time, which is probably why I can’t remember them, my goodness.

[0:30:54] RJ1: Amazing, I love it. That’s perfect. Joe, what about you? Do you – have I taken us too far back or do you remember?

[0:31:01] Rebecca Jolly: I really don’t remember. But music for me is so situational, right? I mean, the time of the day, the mood that I am in, you know, whether I want to sort of like, you know, enhance that mood or change that mood, you know, music is different for me throughout the day, throughout any given day and I really, you know, I struggle with the question when people say, “What kind of music do you like?” Because I really like different music for different occasions.

[0:31:26] RJ1: Yeah, my MySpace song definitely –

[0:31:28] Rebecca Jolly: I think he’s dodging the question.

[0:31:30] RJ1: I think he is dodging the question. I was going to throw you off.

[0:31:32] Rebecca Jolly: I do a good job at that. Did I do a good job at dodging? Good, I’m glad.

[0:31:37] RJ1: Mine was most certainly “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” by Fall Out Boy so.

[0:31:42] Rebecca Jolly: Panic at the Disco.

[0:31:42] RJ1: There we go, there we go. Oh, is it? Oh, it is Panic at the Disco.

[0:31:46] Rebecca Jolly: Yes, it’s a great song.

[0:31:47] RJ1: Look at me betraying myself. Yes and then I guess it just isolated between every song From Under the Cork Tree, which would make sense and then speaking of songs and personal identity and branding, we’ve seen a recent pop culture thing where it’s really reflecting someone’s personal brand and I’d like to know what you guys think of just this kind of phenomenon as a whole. Miss Margot Robbie is currently saying that she finally feels like she made it because Jack Harlow rapped about her and this seems to be like a signal coming from way back in my memory from Michelle Pfeiffer being mentioned in a lot of songs. So do you agree that it is great for her personal brand? Has she arrived because she’s been mentioned in a Jack Harlow song?

[0:32:32] Rebecca Jolly: I’d like to be mentioned in a Jack Harlow song. Can he work us in somehow? Stake your money on MySpace Joe and see if he responds.

[0:32:44] RJ1: Amazing. So I think the general consensus is yes and you guys will be better at getting in touch with him than I am but maybe we can make that happen and then just two other things that I want to mention just in the current zeitgeist and Joe, I think this is more of a question for you. Rebecca, you could surprise us all but you talk a little bit about just music being incorporated into aside from a specific like a Coca-Cola brand. But in pop culture, in music, in video games and I became very familiar with how powerful a song can be in a video game through Florence and the Machine and their work on Final Fantasy and their cover of Stand by Me. Do you have a favorite video game song moment Joe and if so, what is it? And Rebecca, do you have a surprise there for us as well?

[0:33:35] Rebecca Jolly: I actually rediscovered Fall Out Boy because my son was watching YouTube videos of Call of Duty. They would create these Call of Duty videos, consumers would create them and for some reason, they’d put a lot of Fall Out Boy songs on top of them, you know, just this little like mini-trailers and I rediscovered Fall Out Boy because of video games and I think whether it’s video games or you know, we saw Stranger Things. You know, Kate Bush had this amazing placement in Stranger Things and people have rediscovered her and I think that is where you know, all these sort of different mediums when they attach to music can help sort of not just discover music but rediscover music. Just to build on that as well if it’s relevant but firstly, the only song from a video game that I can have in my head at the moment as you are talking about is the Tetris noise. So I think that, A, shows my age and B, shows that I don’t play video games very much but I have been working with music a lot recently and in a kind of different way and putting it into a different space as well to show the power of music. I think we’re talking about that with video games like the power that it can invoke as you are playing games and I’ve been working with a lot of artist recently to create not kind of in the same way but it’s slightly related but to create sound scapes, sound healing scapes. Yeah, I have been working with a lot of artists recently, pop artist like beabadoobee and Flume, Ashnikko to actually on a program about sound healing to try and get Gen Z. To get the younger audience into practices that really can kind of help the anxiety and mental health problems that they are having at the moment and also to kind of turn people away from screens a little bit as we’re talking about video games but kind of actually working with these artists and with some sound healing experts to reconstruct and deconstruct and reconstruct their songs along the sound scapes that actually help with healing. So that has been a really interesting music program I have worked with recently, which can really show you the power of music I think and how it can actually create so much more in your head than just enjoying listening to it. It can actually the power of healing, you in a sense some way and really improving your mental health is something that I think is really important to show how we can go beyond the kind of way we think of working with music and I don’t know if that’s all relevant.

[0:35:51] RJ1: No, it’s completely relevant because I think it really circles back to the original thought behind the question was that you know, when you are thinking of a brand and music, it is not just the jingle or the anthem. There are a ton of different ways that you can employ it. So I think that bringing that back around to different ways, the Gen Z can get into not just music but sound I think is really interesting. We have come up on our time here and I do just want to congratulate you both again, the book is amazing. So much in there, so well-designed and you obviously wrote it both together on your own, which is a huge feat in it of itself, so congratulations. If you wanted people to take away one to two things from the book overall, what would it be?

[0:36:37] Rebecca Jolly: If you’re a brand builder, if you’re a marketer or a CMO, this book hopefully brings value. If you work in the music industry and you are trying to partner your music artist or your music property or your label with brands, hopefully this book has value and I think also if you are trying to break into the space because it is a growing space, it’s a new space and if you are in college, university and you are looking to explore, you know, how to break into that intersection of music and brands, I think this book has value as well. So I think that you know, depending on whatever angle you are coming from, I think you could take away something that hopefully can help you in the book. Yeah, I think the same. I think the point about kind of wanting to get into the industry potentially on either side of it is really relevant because that you know, has taken us and I am not going to say exactly how long because it will definitely show our ages but it has taken us many decades to piece together this unworldly industry and how it operates and all the different facets within it. So you know, our job here that we took on was trying to kind of condense that and simplify and make sure people understood the kind of the spectrum of how both sides of the industry work. So I think hopefully we spelled that out in it, in a really simple way and help people understand how the industry, music industry specifically and then brand industry work alongside that and you know, additionally to that, I am hoping that people understand that how much of a powerful tool music is. And how much can be done with it if it’s done right and how much it can have just such far reaching impact, you know? That was kind of the big goal of this for me is to try and breakdown some traditional barriers where people, you know, the sentiment that sport is a thing to very much put your marketing dollars into and you know, make people realize that there’s so much more to be gotten from aligning with music and the longevity that goes with that is really powerful for them.

[0:38:32] RJ1: Well Rebecca, Joe, I think that you have accomplished just that. I think that any brand leader or marketer will come away from this book feeling super excited about the possibilities and then you have given them a really strong way to implement them. So it’s been such a pleasure. I am so excited about what you are doing. Again, the book is called, How Music Grows Brands, and besides checking out the book, where can people find you both on the Internet?

[0:38:57] Rebecca Jolly: So you can find us on LinkedIn, you can find us on Instagram. I am @joebelliotti on Instagram and Rebecca is, where are you Rebecca? I am @jolly81ny. I possibly need to rethink that and actually LinkedIn is probably best but Rebecca Jolly on LinkedIn.

[0:39:16] RJ1: Excellent. Thank you both so much for your time. Everyone, check out the book, How Music Grows Brands by Rebecca Jolly and Joe Belliotti and we will see you next time. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can find, How Music Grows Brands by Rebecca and Joe, on Amazon. A transcript of this episode as well as all of our previous episodes is available at authorhour.co and for more Author Hour, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite subscription service. Thank you for joining us, we’ll see you next time. Same place, different author.