17 Asian markets
TBA
The case
Move Your World Beat is Toyota Motor Asia’s music platform, developed with VIRTUE Asia and running across 17 markets. In its first phase, seven artists from six countries each wrote and produced their own track using sounds recorded from Toyota vehicles as instruments: Valentina Ploy (Thailand), Shye (Singapore), 2pillz (Vietnam), Natasha Noorani (Pakistan), Belle Sisoski (Malaysia) and Paolo and Miguel Benjamin of Ben&Ben (Philippines).
For the next phase, VIRTUE Asia brought in Tracks & Fields with a harder brief: turn those six finished, independent tracks into one collaborative song. Not a feature list. Not six verses stitched to a common beat. A record that sounds like a band made it.
The campaign was built on three themes: collective progress, collaboration, and heritage meeting innovation. Which set the bar: if the music sounded like an ad rather than a real release, it would fail both the artists’ own audiences and Toyota’s credibility in the region.
Tracks & Fields led collaboration strategy, music creative direction, the songwriting camp, production, shoot supervision, release, royalty framework/ distribution and song marketing.
What the industry playbook suggested
The standard route is a multi-artist feature. Write one track to a shared brief, send stems out, collect parts back, sequence them. Every artist records alone, approvals happen at the end, and the brand gets a track with six names on it.
The ambition for this project was more innovative, but musically challenging. The six songs already existed. All in different keys, tempos, genres, instrumentation, cultural references and each one belonged to an artist who had already finished it. A generalist approach would have run parallel remote sessions with minimal real-time contact and delivered a competent stitch-together. Six songs in a row, not one song.
It would also have treated the artists’ approval as a final step rather than a starting condition. Seven artists across six management setups, from established regional stars to independents, all holding creative approval rights: any one of them could have withheld sign-off and ended the project.
What our infrastructure unlocked
Creative Feasibility
Before we started this project, we dealt with the big elephant in the room. The concept is ground breaking and exciting. But the most important question was: can you take 6 songs by 7 artists and turn it into a banger that people want to listen to? So our team got to work. We took a deep dive into the artists materials and sounds and created several mockups to prove not only that it works but that it is something that will truly resonate with music fans across the region.
Designing the process, not just the music.Toyota commissioned a culture program, not an ad and therefore authenticity was key. We did want the track to become something that is the sum of the artists’ creativity and identity and creating an environment where creative collaborators organically become a pan-asian supergroup. This required not only the right conditions for collaboration, but also the creative and operational expertise to ensure complexity never got in the way of the creative idea.
Tracks & Fields built and ran a structured virtual songwriting camp. Our opening statement was simple: “this is a creative safe space, there are no bad ideas, every input is valid and we are writing and producing your song”. From then, the ideas were flowing and the track was built: Day 0 briefing, Day 1 collaborative writing, Day 2 recording and feedback, Day 3 full lock. Sessions were staggered in batches across time zones so that artists were writing together in real time rather than swapping parts by file transfer.
The sequence was deliberate. It gave every artist visible ownership of the shared song before anything was finalized, which turned approval into participation. Nobody needs to approve their own work.
Three principles held the music together:
- Car sounds as structure, not garnish. Sounds recorded from an actual Toyota were built into the rhythmic backbone of the combined track, rather than layered on as an effect.
- Heritage instruments as the sonic core. Each artist wove in their own instrument: Belle Sisoski’s rebab and tapi, Valentina Ploy’s khaen, 2pillz’s dan moi, Natasha Noorani’s alghoza, Shye’s guzheng, Ben&Ben’s kulintang. Played by the artist whose tradition it comes from. No generic “world music” layer.
- One test for the lyrics: does this sound like a real song or an ad? That kept collective progress and collaboration in the writing rather than on top of it.
In parallel handled the rights framework a seven-writer collaborative work requires: royalty splits agreed upfront rather than renegotiated after release, creative approval rights navigated across label, publisher and management sign-offs, and DSP release conditions cleared, including Toyota’s presence as an artist page and in artwork.
The result
Seven artists. Six countries. Six separate songs. One collaborative track, written, recorded and locked in under a week – and a group that arrived on the music video set behaving like a band rather than six contributors.
If your creative ambition depends on artists collaborating rather than just appearing, let’s talk about the infrastructure that makes it work.