Music Sponsorships - Everything You Need To Know

Financial resources are significant when building your career in the music industry. Funding and sponsorship deals could be a game changer. While the music industry ecosystem is slowly becoming more accommodating to independent musicians, 2024 is your year, given the right push you need.

 

In this blog article, we have tried to cover a few things:

1. What is a Music Sponsorship?
   
   
2. Why are Brand Sponsorships important?
   
   
3. How to get Music Sponsorship?
   
   
4. 4 Brands You Could Collaborate With
   
   
5. Our Final Thoughts
   
    

What is a Music Sponsorship?

For artists, pure brand sponsorship is arguably the most profitable. Here, a business offers financial compensation to an artist in return for the artist performing specific tasks related to the brand’s promotion. These could include anything from nice remarks in interviews to social media posts to appearing in advertisements and commercials

 

You could work together with a company or brand that aligns with your beliefs and objectives. That company will sponsor your music in exchange for the brand’s exposure. This can be in the form of filming yourself playing a guitar to promote a guitar manufacturer/company. A music sponsorship is basically where you could potentially get paid for partnering with a company for its promotion or other promising deals you could sign up for. 

 

Pssst…come here: Some sponsors tend to pay per social media post, some others help you get the instruments for free, and so on. When you are just starting out, try to be open to all sorts of collaborations and try to understand what may work best for you. As you progress through different sponsorships, you’ll be better at picking ones that will benefit you. 

 

Why are Brand Sponsorships important?

It’s a win-win situation for both you and the company that will sponsor you because they’d benefit from the exposure and you could benefit from the financial compensation among other things (who doesn’t like free stuff!). 

There are different types of brand sponsorships you should know about: 

 

Endorsements

In the music industry, endorsements are almost typical, but the specifics of individual deals can vary greatly. In layman’s terms, an endorsement is a deal between a company and a musician, where the former gives the latter one of its products to promote on different mediums or marketing strategies. This is mostly the purview of instrument makers who give musicians instruments and gear so they can more successfully market their goods. 

 

A full endorsement is usually the music sponsorship offered when a musician is at the top of their game,  and they can frequently get paid for performing live and in music videos on an instrument made by a certain manufacturer. Jenifer Lopez endorsed multiple brands in her music video Papi. She featured a Blackberry mobile and a Fiat 100 - talk about subtlety here!

As mentioned before, you also get sponsorship deals that offer you free stuff. Instrument companies or manufacturers, frequently give away free merchandise to musicians in the hopes that it would lead to media attention featuring them playing the instruments. An early instance of this was when Fender equipped The Beatles with an enormous array of gear for the recording of the Get Back sessions. This led to significant coverage of John Lennon's 6-string bass and blonde Starcaster, George Harrison's renowned red wine Telecaster, and Billy Preston's Fender Rhodes electric piano. Additionally, Fender is excellent at giving guitars as gifts for important events. In 2018, they gave a gold glitter telecaster to every one of their supported musicians who was nominated for a Grammy.

Another subtext to this is the discounted product. There are sponsorship deals where you receive discounted price deals on instruments or equipment in exchange for a reel on Instagram promoting their company and the like. 

 

Pssst…come here: Sometimes you also get an affiliate link when you promote the company’s products - so a commission fee is given to you, once someone clicks the link to purchase the product you have put up on your social media. The discounts may be a unique code with your name as well. 

 

Event Partnerships 

 

Brand music festival sponsorships and tour/gig sponsorships are two important ways that brands may help artists. Again, there are a few different ways for brands to participate in festivals and live events, but the most common ones are either sponsorships of the event or maybe a stage at the event where the brand pays the artists' performance fees and takes advantage of the chance to promote their product with riders and signage on and around the performance area.  

 

Another option is for a company to deliver their product or service at the event - occasionally for free, usually for a fee. This might take the shape of internet access, beverages for private rooms special performances, and so on. 

 

Awareness Campaigns 

 

Charity, on the other hand, is quite different when it comes to endorsement, and the flow of funds is in reverse. In this case, musicians are utilized as brand ambassadors to help increase awareness of nonprofit projects in which they are either directly involved financially or have chosen to support. One example is Bono's co-founding of the RED organization, which fights the spread of HIV/AIDS in third-world countries.

 

How to get Music Sponsorship?

 

Shouldn’t the company approach you first? Well, that is right. But you can always make yourself an artist and your music, is unique and seems ideal for sponsorships. Plus, approaching them first will seem a little odd but you’d be doing something different that will effectively make you stand out in the crowd. 

 

Develop Your Music Brand 

 

Your brand identity is everything. Your music brand will represent the ideology and vision you stand for, making it easy for potential sponsors to recognize if you’d be a great fit in collaboration, especially if it is something that involves philanthropic events and projects. Marketing and communication tactics that you would normally use for your music campaign are not distinct components of music branding. Furthermore, these music marketing methods aim to create a solid experience that creates a lasting impact and builds a loyal fan base. Brand identification, brand communication, brand style, brand awareness, brand allegiance, and a variety of other tactics are critical components of music branding. 

 

Identify Potential Sponsors

 

Once you have established a full-fledged music brand and an online presence to support that, you could go ahead and time to start looking for possible sponsors when you've established your artist brand and audience. The obvious brands will come to mind, but it's also crucial to think about smaller - and more feasible - sponsorship options and brands that connect with your artist's beliefs and music genre. 

 

Pssst…come here: You could learn more by analyzing influencer marketing strategies. These influencers often collaborate and promote with brands, and these brand collaborations run more on the basis of content on social media. Make sure you have a good enough following and social media game in 2024!

Rappers have always collaborated with shoe brands. Big Sean collaborated with Adidas, Cardi B partnered with Reebok, Kendrick Lamar with Nike, and Eminem with Jordan to name a few. You could collaborate with different brands depending on the kind of music you make and the companies that would best suit the kind of music you make. It wouldn’t make any sense if you were a singer-songwriter collaborating with a sneaker company. So try to identify and rule out companies in the big list. 

 

Draft A Sponsorship Proposal

 

Once you make a narrowed-down list of all the potential sponsors, you should start writing a sponsorship proposal. This is a document that entails a sponsorship pitch. It should essentially highlight your music brand and describe the advantages of working with you. This is where a well-crafted EPK and artist bio, can help you stand out. 

 

Pssst…come here: Your EPK may be a standard document that could be used for any sponsor, but make sure that when you are writing the pitch, you make sure it is customized and tailored to fit the ideologies and particulars of the sponsor you would be sending the document to. 

 

We recommend making your EPK an easy-to-understand, direct, and short - one-page sheet. Include all the essential details in that one sheet only, and try to give stats - numbers do speak. Include your social media links, pictures of how it looks, and insights on your social media, be it TikTok or Instagram, and conclude that sheet with one strong line - perhaps your music brand tagline. 

 

Try cold emailing as well! Cold emails are sent once and are intended to initiate a discussion with prospective clients (the sponsors and brands you’d like to work with), that have no previous contact with the the person who sent them (you, the artist), compared to e-mail marketing, which frequently involves sending a number of specific messages over time in order to create a relationship with the recipient. 

 

Start off with a personalized intro that shows your understanding and admiration of their brand and its ideology. Emphasize your distinctive unique characteristics, such as your musical style, any notable prior performances, or any honors you’ve received over your music career, to better convince the brand or the sponsor. Have realistic expectations because not every sponsor or brand will reply to your email, however, don’t stop the cold emailing, one response should be indicative enough of a prospective working sponsorship deal. 

 

Once you do that, reach out to different sponsors and email them! Note that, smaller brands and sponsors, that probably have a niche following and audience will be more open and responsive to independent artists like yourself, compared to bigger and more popular sponsors. Make sure you include such community based, smaller brands in your email list as well. 

 

4 Brands You Could Collaborate With

 

TacoBell 

 

Taco Bell’s Feed the Beat program has worked with over 1,700 artists/bands. Along with offering marketing to assist musicians in growing their fans, Feed The Beat provides $500 in Taco Bell gift cards to touring musicians with no conditions whatsoever. The Feed The Beat slogan is “Free Food. Great Music.” In addition to supplying tour fuel, the Feed The Beat initiative assists diverse musicians by offering them a stage at events across the country and presenting their songs in national television ads (let’s not forget that you also get to brag about being sponsored by Taco Bell). 

 

Thread Society

 

Thread Society is an apparel business that purchases top-of-the-line materials from responsible vendors across the globe, carefully picking them to present consumers with the greatest quality clothes. Thread Society, in addition to providing high-quality casual clothing, also develops highly breathable merchandise for musicians.  Thread Society has reported being active with the music industry and neighborhood organizations. Keep checking the Facebook Page of the organization and email them your pitch! 

 

Red Bull

For those of you who make rap songs, afro beats, commercial pop songs, and the like, Red Bull may be your best shot. The brand, known for its imaginative, out-of-the-box marketing, aspires to be a go-to beverage that is at home blended with vodka or sipped on a skating outing. And what goes hand in hand in such instances? Music. The company has managed the Red Bull Music Academy, a festival sponsored by the brand, for over a decade. Every year, the “academy” brings in students and upcoming artists from all over the world to a renowned global metropolis. 

 

Our Final Thoughts

Brand sponsorships and collaborations are a lot easier to get if your online presence is impactful. So make sure that your social media is always updated, your official website has all the details and your pitches are creative and professional! 

We at GreaseRelease, have a bunch of curators on our network who are looking for new & exciting music to push on their massive playlists. If you make music and want to reach a wider audience, check out our submission platform and get a chance to reach millions of listeners! Submit your tracks now!