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From tour sponsorships to Taco Bell commercials featuring Turnstile, major companies see billion-dollar branding opportunities in partnering with artists, and a new study from Luminate has some matchmaking suggestions.
The industry-leading music analytics platform looked at five years’ worth of survey results and metrics measuring likability, awareness and brand endorsement to determine the best artists to market sodas, snack foods, cosmetics and credit cards. “Cultural capital isn’t something brands should tap into retroactively,” the report authors write. “Behavioral audience entertainment data can inform marketers, helping them to locate artists whose fan base matches a brand’s target audience. Think of it as ‘moneyball’ for brand partnerships.”
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Luminate has collected quarterly online survey results from a representative slice of U.S. consumers, ages 13 and up, since 2021. It identified super-purchasers of food & beverage, personal care & hygiene, travel, telecom, mobile apps and banking & finance products, and analyzed the survey results and other metrics to understand their attitudes and perceptions toward some 600 artists and 100 music genres and sub-genres.
The study deliberately stayed away from megastars like Taylor Swift and instead identified artists who may be less well known, but who among certain groups are well-liked and trusted, and therefore could provide brands with a better return on their marketing dollars, says Grant Gregory, a researcher and manager at Insights at Luminate.
“The decision-making process was a mix of identifying artists with high likability AND artists who are uniquely appealing (in terms of likability) or have uniquely high reach (in terms of awareness) among that category purchasing group vs. the general population,” says Gregory.
The artists who scored among the highest in each consumer category were: country crossover star Bailey Zimmerman for food and beverage products, the queen of regional Mexican music Ana Bárbara for personal care & hygiene products, rising country star Lainey Wilson for banking and finance, Bebe Rexha for telecom, Jamaican singer and rapper Shenseea for service and e-commerce apps such as ride hailing and food delivery and electronic artist Kenya Grace for travel.
Here are some of the highlights from the report.
Bailey Zimmerman
The study plotted the “Fall in Love” singer’s likability and brand endorsement scores from survey respondents who bought at least three packaged snacks, coffee or other food products recently. Zimmerman outscored JENNIE, Leon Thomas, Dolly Parton and Queen as a good bet for marketers. While Chris Stapleton had the highest awareness score, Zimmerman won on likability. His fans tend to be younger and more affluent than the overall population and are more likely to listen to music at least twice a week on Apple Music and Spotify.
“Zimmerman presents a narrower but deeper fandom among category buyers,” Luminate’s authors found, while “Stapleton offers a broader though still highly efficient fandom.”
Ana Bárbara
The longtime grupero singer/songwriter Bárbara beat Young Miko, Arya Starr and Dolly Parton when it came to her strength as a personal care product brand endorser, with only Parton beating her on likability. Bárbara scored particularly well in awareness, perhaps due to the current popularity of regional Mexican music. She over-indexes with Millennial, Gen X and even Gen Z consumers, and fan devotion is particularly strong. Those audiences are more likely than most to use social media apps, including TikTok and Instagram.
Lainey Wilson
Wilson falls in the middle of a pack of superstars that includes Stevie Nicks and Kelly Clarkson, who both rank slightly ahead of Wilson on awareness. However, Clarkson ranks high on awareness and public perception but in the average range for fan engagement metrics. Wilson ranked among the highest for likability and purchase likelihood.
Wilson’s fans also tend to have higher-than-average income, with 38% earning more than $75,000 a year, compared to the general population, and more than three-quarters of the banking and financial product consumers surveyed said they would be more likely to buy a product she endorsed, the report found.
Bebe Rexha
“Recognizable, out-of-the-limelight performers such as Bebe Rexha can still shine through in the data,” Luminate’s report found. The Brooklyn born “Meant To Be” singer has had four top 10 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, and her audience tends to skew young, with roughly two-thirds being from the Gen Z and Millennial generations. This audience is more likely than the general audience to use a streaming service like Amazon Prime Video, Netflix or HBO Max at least weekly, and 60% reported they would use a telecom product if she endorsed it. Among the general population, 42% said they would try a telecom product Rexha endorsed.
Shenseea
The Jamaican dancehall singer/rapper is among the best artists to market to a mobile app like Seamless, Uber or Airbnb, Luminate found. While Leon Thomas and Adele ranked slightly higher on likability scores among mobile app super-consumers — defined as people who use two or more mobile apps for services, such as food delivery or ride-hailing — 78% of those consumers who are aware of Shenseea said they would try an app if she endorsed it. That group tends to be more racially diverse, come from the Millennial and Gen X generations and they’re active across social media platforms, the report found.
Kenya Grace
The South African-born British electronic music singer Kenya Grace ranked is less well-known than Shenseea, Lola Young or Riley Green, but Luminate found that her U.S. audience looks a lot like the people travel companies want to target. Their annual incomes are more likely than most to be middle-to-high, with 61% making more than $50,000 annually, compared to less than half of the general population, and Grace’s audience frequently uses video streaming services like Disney+ or YouTube –appealing places for travel companies to advertise.
African music has steadily been making inroads in the U.S. music market, with world music — which includes Afrobeats, K-pop and more — seeing the most growth compared to other genres according to Luminate’s 2023 year-end report that was released last week. The all-encompassing umbrella saw a 26.2% increase in U.S. on-demand audio streams, resulting in a total of 5.7 billion for the year.
Throughout the 2020s, so far, heavy-hitters like Burna Boy, Wizkid and Davido have headlined stadiums, emerging superstars like Tems and CKay have earned radio smashes and skyrocketing acts like Rema and Tyla have scored Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hits. Next month, the Recording Academy will give out an award in the best African music performance category for the first time, after the American Music Awards and MTV Video Music Awards started giving out their own Afrobeats awards. And as much as genres like Nigeria’s Afrobeats and South Africa’s amapiano have been breaking out of the African continent, a lot more needs to be done for them to be fully integrated in the mainstream market.
Approximately 15 music executives from LVRN, YouTube, Spotify, COLORSxSTUDIOS and more — as well as creatives including filmmakers and music producers — came together at Florida’s Joy Miami Studios last Friday to discuss the future of African music and culture during a “Road to AFRICON” roundtable conversation, which was hosted by the media and entertainment brand Amplify Africa.
The hour-and-a-half-long discussion was the first pop-up event Amplify Africa hosted this year ahead of its fourth annual AFRICON, a multi-day conference and celebration of African culture, innovation and entrepreneurship held in Los Angeles that features panels discussing ways to achieve the brand’s goal of uniting the global Black diaspora as well as immersive experiences, from an all-Black marketplace to the AfroBall Gala.
Road to AFRICON 2024 Miami
Courtesy of Amplify Africa
Amplify Africa CEO/co-founder Dami Kujembola kicked off the conversation by asking about the challenges facing African artists who want to break into and thrive in international markets. Buku Ibraheem, music and culture global brand marketing manager at Beats by Dre, cited “translating their cultural impact to people who are not part of the culture. A lot of times, people who are not part of our culture, they see Black music as a monolith. They’re thinking about it through the lens of hip-hop and R&B, but Afrobeats has yet to really make sense to them,” she said.
Ibraheem argued that brands tend to focus on numbers, from artists’ Instagram followers to their TikTok engagement, and as she pitches African artists for major marketing campaigns, she’s proving that their “cultural impact supersedes that. You can’t necessarily put a number on that.” Added Adam McFarland, program manager, Black music and culture at YouTube: “The hard part is drawing a linear line from impact to culture, because it’s not a linear line. It makes sense to us because it’s a lived experience, and we’re able to quantify it based on what we’re seeing. But if it’s not your lived experience, and you’re not seeing that, then you can’t quantify that.”
Ibraheem led the launch of the 2020 Beats x AMBUSH campaign and pitched Burna Boy as the lead talent to Yoon Ahn, Korean-American fashion designer and founder/creative director of the Tokyo-inspired streetwear brand AMBUSH. “If I can prove to the company that not only can [the artists] draw awareness, but they can help us move units, then it gives them opportunity for us to do bigger launches,” she said.
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Ibraheem also explained how brand partnerships should work in both parties’ favor. The November 2020 launch of Burna’s Beats x AMBUSH campaign arrived three months after the release of his fifth studio album Twice as Tall, and the clip spotlighted the track “Way Too Big.” “As a marketer, I hate using Black talent as mascots. How do you partner with talent in a real way and have them become brand ambassadors of your brand?” she said, adding that it’s more valuable for brands to “show up as an active participant” in an artist’s ecosystem, like assisting with their album rollouts, “versus just renting them out.”
Some executives compared the U.S.’ rather slow recognition of Afrobeats to the country’s gradual acceptance of one of its homegrown genres: hip-hop. Arising in the 1970s among New York’s Black, Latino and Caribbean inner-city youth, hip-hop transformed from a cultural movement into a commercially successful global phenomenon. In 2017, hip-hop became the most dominant genre in the U.S. for the first time since Nielsen Music started tracking sales in 1991. Hip-hop, which notably celebrated its 50th birthday last year, has maintained its position as the No. 1 U.S. genre since then. Similar to hip-hop’s ascent, Afrobeats has been steadily gaining traction from the global Black diaspora, and it’s only a matter of time until mainstream (read: white) audiences fully catch on.
“It took America a long time to fully give hip-hop the money that it was supposed to get. Now, hip-hop artists are cashing out. So I think it’s [up to] us [to be] a little patient, but also push forward and know that we’re going to have to kick some doors down,” said LVRN president/co-founder Tunde Balogun, whose company manages Grammy-nominated R&B stars like Summer Walker and 6lack as well as internationally renowned Nigerian acts like Davido and Spinall. “I tell my friends, my people at the labels and investment [firms], like, ‘Yo, you have to almost be willing to lose money to go into a new market and be first and really put your foot down, because you’re going to have to try some things out that other people aren’t.’”
COLORSxSTUDIOS, the Germany-based music performance platform, invested in the continent by hiring a fully local crew to work on multiple productions in Nigeria. That included Oxlade‘s viral “KU LO SA” performance in 2022 that played a pivotal role in transforming the song into a global smash, later receiving a remix from Camila Cabello. Oxlade previously told Rolling Stone that his COLORS shoot was originally supposed to be held at its main Berlin studio, but due to visa clearance issues, he was unable to travel. COLORS then flew to Lagos to shoot him as well as Ayra Starr, Victony, DBN Gogo, BNXN and more as part of its partnership with Spotify RADAR Africa, which aims to help African artists get discovered around the world and expand their audiences outside of their home markets. In his COLORS THREE SIXTY FM episode, Oxlade showed tremendous gratitude to the COLORSxSTUDIOS team — especially sound engineer Paul Lorton, whom he later tapped to mix the studio version of “KU LO SA” — for “taking out time to fly to Nigeria to come shoot Afrobeats artists. We Nigerians are forever grateful for putting us on the map.”
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Jonas Weber, CEO of COLORSxSTUDIOS, explained during the “Road to AFRICON” roundtable discussion that one of the main reasons COLORS worked with Spotify on spotlighting African artists in their native continent was to avoid visa issues, like the one Oxlade ran into.
“Our studio, as many of you know, is in Berlin, and we have pop-up studios. But for us, it was always like, ‘OK, how can we be where stuff is happening?’ One of the things we believe in is you just have to be where [African music is] at,” he said, applauding the platform’s efforts in producing more “on the ground” performances. “I think our responsibility is, ‘Do we bring our own crew or do we work with local talent? How do we empower them? How does the money stay there? How do the rights stay there?’ That’s when you think of economic sustainability and making [Africa] less dependent on other continents. It’s definitely something we have always tried to commit to. For example, with Lagos, we had a full Nigerian crew. In Kenya, it was a full Kenyan crew. We don’t have to talk about it, we just have to do it. And I think if more do that, more money stays within the local hubs and more investment goes into creativity.”
Continuing to build up the infrastructure of the local African music industry to where it’s “self-sustainable,” said Amplify Africa COO/co-founder Timi Adeyeba, continues to be a long-term goal.
“The issue is we’re asking the European, American, Western world to take us in. Can we build Africa to the extent where an industry that has so much power and financial resources is going to an artist like Burna Boy first?” wondered London-based filmmaker Ade O’Adesina, who has helped artists elevate their storytelling through visual mediums and is credited as a consultant on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. “Africa is going to become even bigger where we’re not begging the people on this side to take us in. It’s going to happen.”
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