Back in the L8: Music Licensing for Li Auto’s Latest Campaign
There is a particular kind of ad that does not try too hard. No voiceover. No dramatic reveal. Just a car in the world, doing what it was designed to do, moving through light and landscape with a quiet confidence that does most of the talking. Li Auto’s L8 campaign is that kind of film. And when the visuals are this assured, the music cannot afford to be anything less.
For this campaign, Tracks & Fields handled music licensing. It is not the first time T&F has worked with Li Auto, but the brief this time around asked for something different.
The L8 and the World It Moves Through
The Li Auto L8 is a six-seat premium SUV built for families who do not want to compromise. The campaign leans into that. Rather than a single urban setting or a single dramatic moment, the film moves through a range of environments, wide roads, changing skies, the kind of scenery that makes a journey feel worth taking. The car looks at home in all of it.
But the campaign’s other lead is the interior. Li Auto has built something genuinely impressive inside the L8, and the film takes time to show it. The cabin is spacious and refined, with LIVIS, the brand’s built-in AI assistant, present throughout. It is a detail that matters. LIVIS is becoming a recognisable part of the Li Auto identity, something T&F got to play with on the L9 campaign, where the soundtrack carried a playful nod to the assistant’s name. Here, LIVIS is simply part of the world the film inhabits. Familiar, present, and quietly capable.
The Music That Lets the L8 Breathe
The licensed track is a string piece. Majestic in feeling but restrained in construction. It does not crowd the image. Instead it moves alongside the film, giving the visuals room to land while adding a quiet emotional weight that builds without ever pushing. That kind of writing is harder to pull off than it sounds. Strings can tip into sentimentality quickly, or feel generic in the wrong context. Here, the arrangement stays specific. There is a clarity to it that mirrors the car’s interior: nothing unnecessary, everything considered.
For a campaign built around space and refinement, that balance matters. The L8 is not trying to be loud. The music is not either. What the track brings is presence, the sense that something meaningful is happening on screen, without spelling it out. It earns the feeling rather than manufacturing it.
From the L9 to the L8
Returning to a client is a different kind of brief. There is already a shared language, a sense of what works and what the brand responds to. After the L9 campaign, where T&F composed an original score, the L8 called for a different approach. A licensed track rather than an original. A shift from building something from scratch to recognising what already exists and knowing it belongs here.
That distinction matters less than people sometimes assume. Whether the music is composed or licensed, the question is the same: does it serve the film? Does it carry the mood without overpowering the image? Does it make the car feel like something worth wanting?
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