Does Your Brand Need an A&R Mindset?

Lessons from the music biz on authenticity and cultural relevance

I spent my early career doing something most people in brand marketing have never done. I sat across from unknown recording artists, listened to unfinished songs and decided what could break through.

It was the only path for me, and it started long before I even knew what A&R was. In junior high school, I was the kid in the back of the class with headphones on, reading album credits on CDs and dreaming about one day seeing my name in them.

By my mid-20s, I turned that obsession into my dream “job” at Atlantic Records, where I spent nearly a decade in A&R working with an iconic roster while also discovering new talent (a story for a different time). Today, working with global brands, I see how those same instincts translate. The product may be different, but the opportunity is remarkably similar. Brand marketing could use a little more A&R thinking.

At its core, A&R is about recognizing creative greatness early, helping shape that potential, putting the right collaborators around it so it can flourish and turning undiscovered gems into something culturally relevant that can actually sell. It is the music business, after all.

When I eventually moved from advising labels to advising brands on music supervision, sonic branding, artist partnerships and business affairs, I realized my A&R skill set gave me a unique perspective. Like recording artists, authenticity is everything for brands looking to connect with their audience. And music is one of the few creative tools that can create memory, emotion and identity all at once. Simply put, the right music can position a brand within culture rather than simply advertising to it.

For years, brands treated music as a downstream licensing transaction. Find a track, clear it, drop it into a 30-second spot and move on. That model may not be dead, but it is no longer where the value is.

Today, culture moves at an unprecedented pace. By the time a song is everywhere, the discovery and credibility have already been established by someone else. You know that feeling when you ask a friend, “Have you heard this artist or song yet?” and the answer is “no.” That is the value of getting there first. And it means everything in cultural marketing.

That is what great A&R is built on. It is about being early, being right more often than wrong and being willing to invest before the market validates the decision.

The best creative music agencies approach campaigns the way great A&R executives approach artist projects. Sometimes that means a sync, or simply “needle dropping” a preexisting song. Other times it means creating something original, building a new collaboration, reimagining an existing record or developing an artist relationship that can extend beyond a single campaign. Whatever the direction, it should feel inevitable, as if the story could not have sounded any other way. In a recent conversation with my industry colleague Stasia Jones, Global Production at Condé Nast, she captured the role music can play in a campaign perfectly, “Music plays such an important role in establishing tone and shaping the narrative. Music isn’t just supporting the story, it can fundamentally change how the audience experiences it.”

Making these calls requires instinctive judgment. Data can tell you what song is trending or moving fastest, which is important, but it cannot always tell you why one artist feels authentic and another feels forced. I will leave them nameless here, but I speak to many incredible A&R executives who are frustrated by how far their labels have shifted toward data over feeling. My hope is that great brand leaders will not follow suit.

When a brand gets the music right, the work moves from being watched to being remembered. Ultimately, that is what great advertising is meant to do.

Maybe your brand does not literally need an A&R executive.

But it could probably use an A&R mindset.

Related: Hang the DJ Founders on Music’s Power to Unlock Memories and Emotions