Tracks & Fields Start Culture Partnerships Division and Partners with COLORSxSTUDIOS

In the ongoing quest to provide its clients with new exciting creative music opportunities, Tracks & Fields is happy to reveal we have teamed up with COLORSxSTUDIOS for a Culture Partnership and now exclusively represents its portfolio — both pre-existing and in the future — for global licensing opportunities.

COLORS is a pioneering tastemaker platform known for showcasing emerging artists and future stars in a distinct aesthetic style that is recognised worldwide. With nearly eight million subscribers on their YouTube channel and hundreds of millions of streams each year, their minimalist visuals and signature single-colour backdrops make them a unique channel laser-focused on musical talent, featuring original artists from across the globe. Whether it’s the next viral hit or the next need-to-know singer, COLORS doesn’t just represent culture, it creates it. 

The combination of rising stars and a direct-to-consumer platform is distinctive to the marketplace and has served as a springboard for music careers from now-recognised global superstars such as Billie Eilish, Doja Cat, Tyla or very recently Shaboozey. Without COLORS’ input, many artists that you have on your Spotify most-listened may never have broken out into the mainstream. 

Tracks & Fields and COLORS are two Berlin-headquartered companies with fingers on the pulse of the best music and cultural shifts and relevance, so this culture partnership comes naturally. They can both play off each other’s strengths, identify trends before they happen, and, most importantly, find ways to integrate those trends into era-defining campaigns. 

This doubles down on Tracks & Fields’ strategy to help brands not only continue to find the right music for their campaigns but remain relevant, authentic and trend-setting when interacting with their audiences. As music supervisors, they are confident this collaboration brings fresh, innovative ways to interact with communities through musical experiences —  especially at a time when brands are not only engaged with pop culture but also help shape it at lightning speed. 

By working with Tracks & Fields, brands, agencies, film producers and directors have the inside track on cutting-edge talent and trends and can harness this access to elevate their campaigns and create cultural moments that resonate with their demographics.

The Power of Music for Brands: From Sync Licensing to Finding a Voice in Culture

In an increasingly anatomised world, cultural marketing, whereby brands specifically curate and tailor their message towards target audiences, has increasingly been seen as crucial for growth and impact. This is exactly where we want our culture partnership to play it’s part in shaping, as well as reacting to the worlds trends.

Music has a powerful role in shaping cultural identity and relevance, with a great ability to increase consumer engagement and loyalty by building genuine connections with the audience. In this context, identifying rising artists and song trends early is a key to staying ahead. 

More than ever, we are seeing campaigns featuring artists and incorporating viral trends to boost engagement and authenticity by resonating with their communities at the exact time in which these conversations and trends are happening. 

At Tracks & Fields, we have been fortunate to be a part of the Mercedes Benz EQC campaign with The Weeknd, which features the single “Blinding Lights.” This was the lead single off his breakthrough album After Hours. It posed an unique situation for us as we were a part of the creative process in producing a bespoke song for a major car brand cleared the rights for the song before it was even released, showing how we stayed ahead of the culture to create an impactful advertisement that drove the conversation forward instead of catching up to it. It eventually became the artist’s most well-known song and in November 2021 became the all-time #1 on the Billboard Top 100 charts, a position held by Chubby Checker or “Let Twist Again” since the 1960s.

Another work managed by Tracks & Fields is Volkswagen’s campaign for Taigo, targeted at young people, which collaborated with three up-and-coming artists, Chris James, Yugen Blakrok and Gheist, to create especially-made music videos. In their own words, “Instead of developing just another car ad, that nobody is going to watch, we wanted to hit the zeitgeist and deliver authentic branded content.” As a result, VW gave complete creative freedom to three music artists to create music videos incorporating the new car, while distributing the tracks across Spotify, YouTube and Instagram. This helped to connect Volkswagen with a younger generation with each individual artist working in pop, electronic and hip-hop respectively, with the collective three videos reaching over half a million views on YouTube while the campaign reached a whopping 19.8 million impressions across multiple platforms. Additionally, in an interesting dose of serendipity, Yugen Blakrok had already performed at COLORS before she worked with Tracks & Fields. 

Further afield, one of the most exciting recent examples of this is the back-and-forth engagement between Levi’s and Beyoncé with the release of her country album Cowboy Carter. “Levii’s Jeans,” featuring Post Malone, was a notorious success. The album itself broke several records while the track led to a resurgent interest in Levi’s jeans. This culminated in the brand’s revival of its iconic 1985 Laundrette ad, this time featuring Beyoncé herself as the protagonist, becoming one of the most talked about topics when it dropped. This is a great example of a brand understanding the impact of popular music and leveraging it back into the marketplace. In the first 48 hours alone, the campaign reached $5 million in media impact value. Now Levi’s expects that by the end of the year, its women’s business will bring in $2 billion in sales, with an 11 per cent increase in the last three months alone. 

Creative Opportunities

With this new culture partnership, Tracks & Fields gains exclusive access to all of COLORSxSTUDIOS’ Portfolio of current and future stars, available for one-stop licensing for the first time, as well as its alumni artist roster for head-turning collaborations for music-driven brand campaigns.

Backed by audience insights and expert selection, Tracks & Fields provides a new exciting opportunity for brands to interact with one of the most exciting movements in music culture and appeal to one of the most interesting demographics for marketeers: trend-conscious youth, cultural pioneers and global tastemakers. 

The formation of a Culture Partnership serves to provide brands with the tools to be ahead of the game with the communities they want to reach while tapping into the power of music to create memorable and genuine experiences. It’s about co-creating the cultural moments of tomorrow, today. 

Ready to explore how a Culture Partnership can transform your brand? 

Reach out to us at colors@tracksandfields.com and arrange a call to discuss opportunities for collaboration, syncs and access to unique musical talent. 

Finally, to get a taste of what’s possible, dive into our curated playlist featuring the T&F team’s favourite COLORS sessions!