/nav-logo-desktop.webp "Marketing Architects"){kind=logo}
Episode 144
How the Right Music Can Grow Your Brand
Highly engaging music can double your return on media investment. Yet most brands treat music as an afterthought, leaving millions on the table.
This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob are joined by Roscoe Williamson, Global Strategy Director at MassiveMusic. Together, they dig into groundbreaking research proving music is a tangible driver of marketing effectiveness. Roscoe shares findings from a study with the IPA that tested hundreds of UK TV ads and reveals which types of music increase brand fame, willingness to pay, and campaign ROI.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] The history of music in advertising from jingles to sonic ecosystems
• [09:00] Why longer-form music has been a black hole in effectiveness research
• [14:00] How engaging music can double return on media investment
• [17:00] Examples of brands using music to drive effectiveness
• [23:00] Why CMOs should mandate music testing for campaigns over $1 million
• [27:00] The future of sonic branding and generative AI music
Resources:
IPA & Massive Music Report
Roscoe Williamson’s LinkedIn
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
Chief Marketing Officer
Rob DeMars
Chief Product Architect
Angela Voss
Chief Executive Officer
Roscoe Williamson
Global Strategy Director at MassiveMusic
Transcript
Roscoe: If you are a marketer and you're thinking about how you hit both surprise and recall really, really well then doing rerecording, reimagination, reinterpretations of existing music is a really, really strong way to do that.
Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.
I'm Elena Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects and Rob DeMars, the Chief Product Architect of Misfits and Machines.
Rob: Hello.
Angela: Hi guys.
Elena: And we're joined by a special guest, Roscoe Williamson. Roscoe is the Global Strategy Director at Massive Music, a creative and research leader helping brands harness the power of sound to drive real business impact. He started out studying chemistry before turning his lifelong passion for music into a career. He composed for brands and eventually built Massive Music's London office. Over the past decade, he's helped shape the sound identities of global brands like TikTok, the Premier League, Colgate, Palmolive, eBay and Gymshark. Now he leads Massive Music's global strategy, insights, and culture teams bridging creative innovation with data to prove something we all feel, but rarely measure that music can grow brands. So Roscoe, thanks for joining us today.
Roscoe: Oh, thank you. Yeah, it's lovely to be with you guys. Thank you.
Rob: Well, Roscoe, I'm excited that you're here. Gonna fanboy out a bit. Love the art of sound in particular, if I'm not mistaken, you are heavily involved or the creator of the TikTok Sonic logo, which is arguably one of the most iconic sounds in social media. Now, my intelligence network, which is a team of elves, tells me that it contains the sound of a dog barking and that it was an accident that happened during production, but you guys decided to keep it in there. Now I want to hear a quick story about that. I'll confess I had to listen to the playing of that logo several times before I heard the dog bark. That was fascinating. Now too, did the elves have it right?
Roscoe: The elves. The elves have been going deep. That's great. Yeah, kudos to the elves. So yeah, you're absolutely right. So I was co-leading the team. I have to give credits to my past colleague, Afroditi Lenin, and I really did drive that project alongside the rest of the team. And it was a labor of endurance, let's say. It was almost two and a half years to get that sound out. But yeah, so I guess the sort of Easter egg dog bark sound stems from, at one point in the creative exploration we were looking at, could we sort of have a fixed part of the sound?
And then could we always vary the other part with a sort of user-generated sound. And so somewhere along the line, and I'm talking about 2000 sonic logos down the line, it gets very confused as to which version is which. And whilst we all loved the version that's come final, we actually forgot that baked into it was this little dog sound sample. So, by the end it'd been signed off and it was too late. But of course we have to check that it's all legally fine, et cetera. But yeah, and then when you take it out it just doesn't sound quite the same. You know, there's a sort of discordance in there, grittiness, which it needs. So, yeah.
Rob: Wow. So you are in fact the person who let the dog out. Woo, woo. Sorry. I—
Elena: That's so bad.
Rob: I really keep it coming. Coming.
Angela: He has been waiting all weekend—
Rob: I mean, I'm just like, I can't—
Angela: to drop that joke.
Elena: Okay. All right. Let's, I have a dog in my background, so maybe we'll make some magic with this recording too. But let's get into things here. I'm gonna kick us off, as I always do with some research. This one was easy because I sought out Roscoe for this research in partnership with the IPA. Massive Music published a report called Sound Science: How Music is a Missing Link in Marketing ROI. They set out to prove something we've all sensed, but never had real data to back up that the right music doesn't just make ads more memorable, it makes them more effective.
What they did was they tested hundreds of UK TV ads using implicit behavioral science and measured how the music performed across different areas, and they linked those results back to real business outcomes. And they found some incredible things that we're going to talk about today. And that's just a little preview of the research and Roscoe was here to talk about it. So thanks again for joining us, but I wanted us to start at the very beginning. First, could you walk us through the history of music in advertising?
Roscoe: Yeah, absolutely. I do think it's useful to have a bit of a grounding in the background of this, because it helps frame really where we're at now as an industry. So I see the start of this really in the 1920s and with Wheaties, the cereal brand that was basically on life support in terms of it was due to be discontinued. And then a plucky advertising executive called Sam Gale recorded the first ever jingle with a barbershop quartet, put it on the airwaves in the, I think it's the Minneapolis region.
And then recorded the sales. And three quarters of all Wheaties sold nationally over those few months were sold in that region. So very quickly they scaled this up and the Wheaties brand was saved. And you've got the jingle over the airwaves, and of course the other sectors, other brands started to cotton on to the effectiveness of this advertising, and then you kind of get to the fifties and you get this jingle apocalypse, as I call it, where it is just, it's lost its magic because it's everywhere and every single brand in every single sector has a jingle.
And yet, God knows what it was like to listen to the radio or whatever at that time, it must have been fairly horrific. But then the effectiveness trails off and I think seven years ago there was like 21 jingles registered or something in the states. So you can see where that's gone. So that's the sort of birth of, in some ways I think of sonic branding. And there's kind of two tracks I guess, that I'll talk about. One is the creation track where brands are creating distinctive assets and music for themselves. So we'll call that sonic branding. And the other one is the curation element where they're choosing, licensing music.
So if we go forward to the seventies, that idea about curation comes to the fore with Coca-Cola and the Hilltop advert. I'd like to teach the world to sing and that song shot to number one around the world and some of the royalties were directed back to UNICEF, and it's the first example of a brand kind of playing with music, curated music in culture. We then fast forward to the nineties, the birth of Intel inside. Ding, ding, ding, ding. I'm sure we all know it. And, you know, you get again, on an effectiveness level, from 24% brand awareness before playing that mnemonic for a year to over 80% after one year.
So in terms of an intangible asset for the brand, because they've used it for decades and decades and decades, it's worth in the tens, if not hundreds of millions, I would say, that one sound for the brand. And that's the birth of sonic branding. Then I think we can fast forward through to where you get to the 2003 McDonald's. I'm loving it. Ba ba, ba ba. There you go. That one. And that's more flexible. They start to play with it more. And then you can fast forward really to where we're at with this kind of ecosystem era. So TikTok, as we've just talked about, is a sound that is on products. And we know that products have huge reach. And so brands like MasterCard also creating sounds of contactless payment, huge reach.
So brands start to tap, okay, where can we have our brand sound that has huge reach outside of things like TV, digital, okay, products. But then it becomes, how do you tie all this stuff together? And that's where we're at. We're at the age of the ecosystem where brands have product sounds, they have voice, they have music, they have curation principles. They have guidance in how to play in culture with music. And it really becomes more of a holistic thing, and therefore we end up now where I would say we're at the kind of age of effectiveness and sound. So how we study all this stuff and make sure it's having the biggest impact that it can.
Elena: The history is amazing. Just the power of sound and all the different ways you can use it. Rob, did you work on Wheaties? I didn't know about the Wheaties connection, or was that a different?
Rob: General Mills is in our backyard, so pretty much anyone in Minneapolis working in advertising has worked on cereal at some point. So haven't worked on Wheaties, but did work on other cereal brands from them.
Elena: Okay. Yeah, that's fun. Let's talk about the report, because I heard about this report from the Work podcast. I dove into it. I was like, this is so interesting. I'd never seen anything like it in effectiveness research. So what motivated you to take this data-driven approach to music and what were the questions you were hoping to answer through this study?
Roscoe: Yeah. Well, I think if we look at effectiveness in music and sound, there's one area of it that is now a little bit more mature, I would say, which is the study of distinctive assets with sound. So sonic logos, sonic cues, as we all know, there's many different words for distinctive assets, right? But let's call them sonic logos, for example. And in 2020, Ipsos did, actually it was driven by a guy called Alex Sheridan over at Ipsos and did a fantastic study called The Power of View, which really showed across, you know, tens of thousands of US TV commercials that it was sonic distinctive assets, sonic logos that were eight and a half times more likely to drive brand attention than any other distinctive assets during that test, right?
So we're talking visual logos, we're talking colors, we're talking mascots, celebrities, for example. Which was pretty astonishing. So that created a lot of buzz and noise and was responsible for quite a lot of new interest in the area. And then recently, this year, System1 have actually rerun a similar test and found that again, sonic assets are the most likely to increase brand fluency, more than double than all the others. So again, it's back on the radar. But the thing is that it's relatively simple to pre-test and post-test for short, distinctive assets.
What's harder to do is all the other music that's out there, the longer form and whilst there's more of that music than there ever has been, there's more areas that a brand might be playing that music than there ever has been, it's such a black hole in terms of effectiveness. And we all kind of instinctively know that music is a really important part of a campaign and how emotional it is. And yet it's always very underserved in terms of the research. So really we set forth to ask the question, what are the key drivers of effectiveness when it comes to longer form music, which that leads us to the IPA effectiveness study. Yeah.
Elena: I know that you were measuring these four key metrics. How did you land on those and what did they tell you about how music actually works in advertising?
Roscoe: So we did this two ways. Firstly, we leveraged our kind of global talent internally. So we have teams all over syncing music daily, creating music daily, and we really wanted to understand what they felt were the key drivers of success. And then we then went to our partners, particularly, Professor Daniel Müllensiefen who was at Goldsmiths University in London at the time and is now at Hamburg and he's one of the leading experts on music in the mind. And he's worked extensively in media and advertising as well. And so he helped us, together with the IPA and Les Binet, to really start to validate these four in terms of music, cognition, emotional processing, long-term encoding. And if we look at the four that we talk about, we talk about engagement being fundamentally, how much does the music catch your attention and pull you in? Emotional fit? Now fit's an interesting one 'cause many people go, oh, is that brand fit? But actually what we wanted to look at was fit to picture. So how well does the music actually support the narrative and the picture? And surprise? How much does it cut through, stand out, feel incongruous, but kind of right? And recall, how easy is this music for us to stay with us afterwards. So those are the four that we looked at and that together, I guess they come, they're the kind of psychological engine behind it really.
Elena: So when you looked at those four, you found some pretty interesting things. Can you walk us through some of the findings?
Roscoe: Yeah. So I think just to pull out a little bit around the IPA involvement here and Les Binet been obviously Les being an absolute kind of legend of the effectiveness industry. I think what was, you know, what was amazing was to be able to take the IPA cases and take the 100 and I think it's 130 plus films, spread across those cases, all different sectors, and have the econometric data, have all of that business and brand performance data that the IPA have there for us. And then we were able to then cross reference how essentially seven and a half thousand people were evaluating the films across those four metrics that I just spoke about.
And then there's a lot of essentially number crunching under the guidance of both Les and Professor Daniel Müllensiefen to make sure that everything is non-biased and accurate to really look at what are the correlations, the causations between those and the business outcomes. And what we found was really quite startling really. So when we talk about engagement and how much the music pulls you in, the most driver that changed most really here was return on media investment. So the most engaging music could actually double the return on media investment, which is pretty staggering really, but as an average, very good engaging music increased it by up to 32%.
So when you start to think about the total spend of a campaign and you start to think about the fact that the most engaging music was shown to double the return on media investment, and yet how virtually nobody is isolating this driver, it's pretty startling in terms of the amount of money or risk really that's being left on the table for the higher end of the kind of campaign spectrum. And we found these findings time and time again. Now, that was return on media investment, which is one of the most kind of hard hitting, but there's some other really interesting ones as well. So fit, how well the music fits picture increased the willingness to pay. So a kind of premium factor by up to seven times for the most highly fitting music.
And I guess when you think about it, and it came out in some of the qualitative comments as well, that people just perceived the spot to be of high quality or the product, because the music was so well tightly fitting. And then the final two, so surprise and recall, so surprise led to increasing brand fame. In fact, the most surprising piece of music were up to five times more likely to drive brand fame, and recall increased the salience by up to four times. And so of course, some of the music hit these different factors more than once or twice or three times, and you can play with these. But yeah, I think what it shows is that it's definitely not a nice to have, it's a genuine driver of effectiveness and now at least we have some data pointing at how it's doing that. You see what I mean?
Elena: Yeah, that's amazing. And probably a huge untapped opportunity for brands too, that they could make this much of a difference in their ads, yet not a lot of marketers are even aware of it. Could you share an example? I know there's a couple brands in this study, an example of a brand where music really transformed the impact of their ad.
Roscoe: Yeah. I mean, if I'm being really, really strict to myself, to say that they transformed them, I would have to do AB tests with a piece of music, but the ones that we know scored really well, and we can look at our qualitative information from our study and we can see that users are attributing a lot of this feedback to the music. So two stand out. Number one being Costa Coffee advert, I don't know if you guys have Costa, but it's definitely UK, big UK coffee chain. And the spot was called A Nation of Costa Lovers, and it has a rerecording in it of Kiss. I was made for loving you, with a group of just random people's heads poking out the top of a coffee. I mean, it's a bizarre spot.
But the music's amazing because it's this rerecord version done by just general normal people, but it's a song that we know. And what it did is it hit both surprise and recall really well. And I think if you are a marketer or you are creative in an agency and you're thinking about how you hit both surprise and recall really, really well then doing rerecording, reimagination, reinterpretations of existing music is a really strong way to do that. And the second one I wanna pull out is KFC, Believe in Chicken. This was a KFC Christmas campaign. And really what's going on is there's a chef in the commercial kitchen. And it's all quite festive, but what you've got going on in the background is Puccini's Nessun Dorma, and I guess there's this kind of incongruence between the fact that somebody's making KFC chicken and this incredibly famous, beautiful piece of classical music, and it works. Like it just stays with you. And I think what we found with the surprise was that music that makes the viewer, the audience kind of think twice and go, oh, that kind of works. I don't really know why it works. It shouldn't work, but it does. That then tends to stay with the audience and hence, it helps to drive brand fame. So I would say those two standouts. But there's many great examples in the study.
Angela: I think many of us have probably experienced, I know my husband over the weekend, he always calls it an earworm if he gets something that he can't let go of and it's driving him crazy. So clearly the power of music is so powerful. Roscoe, I'd love to jog back to something you mentioned earlier, which was that one of the elements of the study was just how much does the music capture your attention and pull you in emotionally? And the research found that highly engaging music can double your marketing performance. So, in your view, what makes music highly engaging, especially in an ad context?
Roscoe: Yes. So there's a few things here. It's music that in some way emotionally feels engaging in terms of the type of emotion that it's portraying. How that is contrasting potentially to what's going on screen, the structure of that music. So music that maybe starts quieter and builds and lifts and has tension, the lyrical content as well can drive engagement as well. Is that fitting to the picture in some way? Is it being clever in a way that's understated? I think that engagement can also be where the music kind of has some slightly unexpected turns as well that can keep pulling the listener in. How well is it crafted? Does it feel like wallpaper or is it more intentional? So there's many different ways that we can look at engaging, but ultimately it boils down to, for our testing panel, how well does the music draw your attention in.
Angela: Fascinating. Love that there's so much depth to think about there. You know, we as effectiveness evangelists love the empirical rigor in the research. You mentioned it's important to be non-biased and accurate, and we have to look at correlations and causations. You worked with Les who's a bit of a grandfather on how to do this well in the industry on this paper. What did you learn from that collaboration about how to measure creative effectiveness with more rigor?
Roscoe: So much stuff. It was a real honor for the team to work, you know, Les and I think really Les really helped us to anchor everything in the IPA metrics. ROI, pricing, power, fame, salience, long-term business effects. I think also he made sure that we kind of stayed away from, oh yeah, this is interesting call to steer us more towards, does this actually change how people should think and behave? 'Cause if not, then let's leave it out. There's a sort of brutal efficiency that I've noticed with Les. And we both talked at the IPA conference this year in London. And I witnessed Les's slides and literally I know how much work's gone into the research that he was doing on budgets, et cetera.
And yet, you know, when Les presents, there's barely anything on the slides. It's a kind of ultra minimalistic, but the way that he communicates and the way that he can get his point across by having less information really, really kind of inspiring. So that was good. Clarity wins, I think is the lesson there. So, yeah, it was great to work with Les on that.
Angela: Well in the role of a CMO is so complex, so that ability to just distill it down into those simple principles and allow the marketing world to leverage that, it's so great to have bodies like the IPA and yourself to help support marketers on these moves that will move a brand in the direction we all wanna go. If you were advising a CMO that's listening today related to music and advertising, where should they start? What should that strategy look like?
Roscoe: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, if you're spending over, let's say a million on a campaign, either in total, which is not a huge budget in the grand scheme of things, then testing should be in my, well, not mine, but our opinion, non-negotiable, should be mandated because you are essentially gambling potentially a six or seven figure output on personal taste or the taste of the agency's taste, for example. And of course, that taste is hugely important and we're not saying that the agency shouldn't make the decision, the music, because, but why not go into that with some data behind it? So that's one thing.
I think the other thing is if you can't really define the sound of your brand internally to your team, to your agency, then I think you're missing a trick. And what we mean by define the sound of your brand is do you have some guidance on curation for your social media content? Do you have some guidance on your curation for your licensing for more of your flagship content? Do you have a sound? Can you stop somebody in the street or in your industry if you're a B2B, and say, well, what is the sound of your brand? 'Cause if not, then you probably should be asking those questions really. And my advice is to start small, start with the most impactful areas, but start working with specialist companies to start building out guidance and assets that can help increase your effectiveness basically.
Rob: Roscoe, it really goes without saying that my taste is far superior than Angela's. But many would say that music is a subjective thing. So when you're dealing with subjectivity, that can be challenging when you're trying to sell ideas. But this study really offers a lens of objectivity that you can use to approach this kind of work. What does that look like in practice?
Roscoe: Yeah. So having worked in this industry for well over a decade, probably a decade and a half now, I understand the decision making process that goes on and sometimes that can be democratic or sometimes there can be some element of I guess testing and thinking that goes into it, but so often it is the strongest opinion in the room who gets the music choice across the line. And I think that in certain situations that can pull off and that can be fine and that can work. But in other situations, that inherent subjectivity that is often driven by the most senior person in the room can actually be really detrimental to the outcome of the campaign, particularly as we start to see more and more data coming through like this study that shows that actually this is quite tangible in terms of some of the levers that you can pull on it. So the question then becomes, why wouldn't you start to want to test some of this stuff upfront, A, B, C, D, different types of music testing to eliminate some of that subjectivity. And I think the defense of creative choice and creativity, it can actually be a supportive driver of creativity because if you are a creative and you've got a pretty wild card music selection choice that your client's going, what on earth are you thinking with this?
If you're coming with some data that goes, well, actually no, this is over indexing on surprise and recall. So you can use it to your advantage. And I think that agency side, clients will be quite pleasantly surprised with how it can support their creative ideas.
Rob: Love that. Bring the data to sell the big idea and the pretesting of that as well to help support those great ads. You did a great job of taking us through the years of how music has played a role in advertising all the way from the jingle era to the ecosystem of sonic branding. Where's it going? If you were gonna go 10 years from now, you're talking like you're talking now and you're revealing the latest study, where's it going?
Roscoe: Ooh, that's a great question. Yeah, that is a question we were asking ourselves every day at the moment. And of course, the elephant in the room here is generative AI music. Because I think we would be remiss not to discuss generative AI music in the fold, and I would say in 10 years time, the fragmentation that has already happened over the last couple of decades in terms of how brands reach consumers, platforms, et cetera, is only gonna proliferate more. I don't see that stopping. And so therefore it is about how do you have more consistency, more personalization over a kind of plethora of micro moments. And how do you oversee that? So how do you have some more governance on that and how do you look at the effectiveness of that at scale?
So everything from, yeah, what sonic branding becomes in the future. That'll probably be smaller and smaller moments and more fragmented and more like a sonic language, so to speak, to if you've got thousands of influencers who are making content with you. And we know some of the big conglomerate clients are going heavy on influencer marketing and we're seeing some of the data coming out about the effectiveness of that in terms of brand building actually, which is quite interesting marketing. So how do you have some kind of guidance or guardrails over the type of music that they're using? And so I think what we'll see is a combination of different forms of music, generative AI music, license music, production music, everything in between, commercial music. But I would imagine in 10 years time that brands are gonna really want to have a much better handle on how that stuff is performing in real time out in the market and being able to, almost like with a dashboard, being able to kind of oversee that and quantify that and make tweaks in real time. I would say that's probably where we're going with it.
Rob: Amazing level of sonic intelligence and yet, it's really hard to even think 10 years out with what's going on with AI and its impact on the creator. So that's a great perspective to bring to the table. Alright, we love good contrarian viewpoints on this podcast. I have to imagine you have a few. What's your biggest?
Roscoe: If you think about the soundtrack as essentially probably carrying maybe even more than half of the effectiveness of a spot, and yet how grossly underlooked that is, again, going back to my earlier point, if you're spending large amounts of money or even medium amounts of money on a campaign and you're not testing it, then you are risking, you're gambling six to seven figures of outcome on subjectivity. And I would say my other point is that the industry is still visually obsessed, almost to a fault. It needs to balance that out with some more sonic obsession.
Rob: You are a brother from another mother. We've talked about that on this podcast. That's awesome.
Elena: Yeah, just the importance of that. I love it. We need to be more sonic obsessed. I wanted to wrap up with something kind of fun. In your opinion, Roscoe, this might be the hardest question of the podcast. What is the best song of all time?
Roscoe: Yeah, weirdly, it didn't take me long to come to this answer. And it's Frank Sinatra's version of My Way. Oh yeah, yeah.
Elena: That's a great one.
Roscoe: So I actually, and again, it's very fortunate that none of you were there to hear it, but I actually sung this song at my wedding. So yeah, so it holds an emotional point for me. But what's interesting about this song is structurally, it keeps building and building and building and thinking about engagement, thinking about how much that it pulls you in is incredible. Yeah. And it can work at weddings, right? It can work at funerals, it can work in films, it can work in advertising. And I think the other thing about the song is that if you listen to it at different parts in your life, right? If you listen to it in your twenties and then you listen in your forties, you listen in your sixties or seventies, actually, I'm pretty sure it hits in different places according to where you are in your life. And I think that is the marker of a really amazing piece of music, how it can be so multifaceted, right? And appeal to people in different ways. So yeah, there you go.
Rob: So you guys know Jason Bateman? Obviously the actor Jason Bateman, his father-in-law wrote that song.
Roscoe: Oh, oh, there we go.
Rob: My team of elves told me that.
Roscoe: That is amazing. That is amazing. Yeah. That's a great tune.
Elena: Yeah. Rob Ann, did you have a song to share? You're not as qualified as Roscoe, but—
Angela: No, not at all. Not even close. It's not as sophisticated. I love Eye of the Tiger. I too think it's multifaceted. It can have a lot of application. Rob, what's yours?
Rob: This is where I prove I have better taste in music. No, I'm joking. That's a great song. Mine is a bit obscure and I had to think about this. This wasn't as easy was for Roscoe. But if I had to capture a song, I'm gonna go with Two Out of Three Ain't Bad by Meatloaf.
Angela: Oh.
Rob: A little rock opera. And just like sonic branding, rock opera is very underappreciated. And Meatloaf's lungs are just amazing. And the irony in that song, when you listen to that sweet melody and then actually listen to the lyrics, you're like, wow, okay, alright. This isn't a love song at all, even though you think you're listening to a love song the whole time.
Roscoe: Yeah, so I need to go and listen to that straight away. Thank you for reminding me of that one.
Elena: Yeah, I went the opposite of the purpose of the show. I went totally subjective for my choice. I picked Purple Rain by Prince, but I do think that's a great song. But Prince is our Minnesota connection. He lived just like 15 minutes from me. It has one of the greatest guitar solos ever. It became a part of this movie, Purple Rain. And one of my favorite Prince stories is during when he did a Super Bowl halftime show, it was raining so hard they came up to him and said, hey, we think you shouldn't go on. It's too dangerous out there. And he said, can you make it rain harder? And then he went out there and performed Purple Rain in the rain.
Rob: That is awesome.
Elena: Just iconic moments with that song. But Roscoe, thank you so much for joining us today. This was so fun. Learned a lot. Where can people follow you and learn more about what you're doing at Massive Music?
Roscoe: Yeah, so massivemusic.com. And we're on all the socials. We're on Insta, LinkedIn, et cetera. So yeah, check us out there.
Elena: Love it.
Angela: So great to have you.
Elena: Yeah. Thank you.
Roscoe: Yeah. Thank you so much.
Rob: Thank you, Roscoe. That was awesome.
Episode 144
How the Right Music Can Grow Your Brand
Highly engaging music can double your return on media investment. Yet most brands treat music as an afterthought, leaving millions on the table.
This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob are joined by Roscoe Williamson, Global Strategy Director at MassiveMusic. Together, they dig into groundbreaking research proving music is a tangible driver of marketing effectiveness. Roscoe shares findings from a study with the IPA that tested hundreds of UK TV ads and reveals which types of music increase brand fame, willingness to pay, and campaign ROI.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] The history of music in advertising from jingles to sonic ecosystems
• [09:00] Why longer-form music has been a black hole in effectiveness research
• [14:00] How engaging music can double return on media investment
• [17:00] Examples of brands using music to drive effectiveness
• [23:00] Why CMOs should mandate music testing for campaigns over $1 million
• [27:00] The future of sonic branding and generative AI music
Resources:
IPA & Massive Music Report
Roscoe Williamson’s LinkedIn
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
Chief Marketing Officer
Rob DeMars
Chief Product Architect
Angela Voss
Chief Executive Officer
Roscoe Williamson
Global Strategy Director at MassiveMusic
Subscribe on
Enjoy this episode? Leave us a review.
Transcript
Roscoe: If you are a marketer and you're thinking about how you hit both surprise and recall really, really well then doing rerecording, reimagination, reinterpretations of existing music is a really, really strong way to do that.
Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.
I'm Elena Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects and Rob DeMars, the Chief Product Architect of Misfits and Machines.
Rob: Hello.
Angela: Hi guys.
Elena: And we're joined by a special guest, Roscoe Williamson. Roscoe is the Global Strategy Director at Massive Music, a creative and research leader helping brands harness the power of sound to drive real business impact. He started out studying chemistry before turning his lifelong passion for music into a career. He composed for brands and eventually built Massive Music's London office. Over the past decade, he's helped shape the sound identities of global brands like TikTok, the Premier League, Colgate, Palmolive, eBay and Gymshark. Now he leads Massive Music's global strategy, insights, and culture teams bridging creative innovation with data to prove something we all feel, but rarely measure that music can grow brands. So Roscoe, thanks for joining us today.
Roscoe: Oh, thank you. Yeah, it's lovely to be with you guys. Thank you.
Rob: Well, Roscoe, I'm excited that you're here. Gonna fanboy out a bit. Love the art of sound in particular, if I'm not mistaken, you are heavily involved or the creator of the TikTok Sonic logo, which is arguably one of the most iconic sounds in social media. Now, my intelligence network, which is a team of elves, tells me that it contains the sound of a dog barking and that it was an accident that happened during production, but you guys decided to keep it in there. Now I want to hear a quick story about that. I'll confess I had to listen to the playing of that logo several times before I heard the dog bark. That was fascinating. Now too, did the elves have it right?
Roscoe: The elves. The elves have been going deep. That's great. Yeah, kudos to the elves. So yeah, you're absolutely right. So I was co-leading the team. I have to give credits to my past colleague, Afroditi Lenin, and I really did drive that project alongside the rest of the team. And it was a labor of endurance, let's say. It was almost two and a half years to get that sound out. But yeah, so I guess the sort of Easter egg dog bark sound stems from, at one point in the creative exploration we were looking at, could we sort of have a fixed part of the sound?
And then could we always vary the other part with a sort of user-generated sound. And so somewhere along the line, and I'm talking about 2000 sonic logos down the line, it gets very confused as to which version is which. And whilst we all loved the version that's come final, we actually forgot that baked into it was this little dog sound sample. So, by the end it'd been signed off and it was too late. But of course we have to check that it's all legally fine, et cetera. But yeah, and then when you take it out it just doesn't sound quite the same. You know, there's a sort of discordance in there, grittiness, which it needs. So, yeah.
Rob: Wow. So you are in fact the person who let the dog out. Woo, woo. Sorry. I—
Elena: That's so bad.
Rob: I really keep it coming. Coming.
Angela: He has been waiting all weekend—
Rob: I mean, I'm just like, I can't—
Angela: to drop that joke.
Elena: Okay. All right. Let's, I have a dog in my background, so maybe we'll make some magic with this recording too. But let's get into things here. I'm gonna kick us off, as I always do with some research. This one was easy because I sought out Roscoe for this research in partnership with the IPA. Massive Music published a report called Sound Science: How Music is a Missing Link in Marketing ROI. They set out to prove something we've all sensed, but never had real data to back up that the right music doesn't just make ads more memorable, it makes them more effective.
What they did was they tested hundreds of UK TV ads using implicit behavioral science and measured how the music performed across different areas, and they linked those results back to real business outcomes. And they found some incredible things that we're going to talk about today. And that's just a little preview of the research and Roscoe was here to talk about it. So thanks again for joining us, but I wanted us to start at the very beginning. First, could you walk us through the history of music in advertising?
Roscoe: Yeah, absolutely. I do think it's useful to have a bit of a grounding in the background of this, because it helps frame really where we're at now as an industry. So I see the start of this really in the 1920s and with Wheaties, the cereal brand that was basically on life support in terms of it was due to be discontinued. And then a plucky advertising executive called Sam Gale recorded the first ever jingle with a barbershop quartet, put it on the airwaves in the, I think it's the Minneapolis region.
And then recorded the sales. And three quarters of all Wheaties sold nationally over those few months were sold in that region. So very quickly they scaled this up and the Wheaties brand was saved. And you've got the jingle over the airwaves, and of course the other sectors, other brands started to cotton on to the effectiveness of this advertising, and then you kind of get to the fifties and you get this jingle apocalypse, as I call it, where it is just, it's lost its magic because it's everywhere and every single brand in every single sector has a jingle.
And yet, God knows what it was like to listen to the radio or whatever at that time, it must have been fairly horrific. But then the effectiveness trails off and I think seven years ago there was like 21 jingles registered or something in the states. So you can see where that's gone. So that's the sort of birth of, in some ways I think of sonic branding. And there's kind of two tracks I guess, that I'll talk about. One is the creation track where brands are creating distinctive assets and music for themselves. So we'll call that sonic branding. And the other one is the curation element where they're choosing, licensing music.
So if we go forward to the seventies, that idea about curation comes to the fore with Coca-Cola and the Hilltop advert. I'd like to teach the world to sing and that song shot to number one around the world and some of the royalties were directed back to UNICEF, and it's the first example of a brand kind of playing with music, curated music in culture. We then fast forward to the nineties, the birth of Intel inside. Ding, ding, ding, ding. I'm sure we all know it. And, you know, you get again, on an effectiveness level, from 24% brand awareness before playing that mnemonic for a year to over 80% after one year.
So in terms of an intangible asset for the brand, because they've used it for decades and decades and decades, it's worth in the tens, if not hundreds of millions, I would say, that one sound for the brand. And that's the birth of sonic branding. Then I think we can fast forward through to where you get to the 2003 McDonald's. I'm loving it. Ba ba, ba ba. There you go. That one. And that's more flexible. They start to play with it more. And then you can fast forward really to where we're at with this kind of ecosystem era. So TikTok, as we've just talked about, is a sound that is on products. And we know that products have huge reach. And so brands like MasterCard also creating sounds of contactless payment, huge reach.
So brands start to tap, okay, where can we have our brand sound that has huge reach outside of things like TV, digital, okay, products. But then it becomes, how do you tie all this stuff together? And that's where we're at. We're at the age of the ecosystem where brands have product sounds, they have voice, they have music, they have curation principles. They have guidance in how to play in culture with music. And it really becomes more of a holistic thing, and therefore we end up now where I would say we're at the kind of age of effectiveness and sound. So how we study all this stuff and make sure it's having the biggest impact that it can.
Elena: The history is amazing. Just the power of sound and all the different ways you can use it. Rob, did you work on Wheaties? I didn't know about the Wheaties connection, or was that a different?
Rob: General Mills is in our backyard, so pretty much anyone in Minneapolis working in advertising has worked on cereal at some point. So haven't worked on Wheaties, but did work on other cereal brands from them.
Elena: Okay. Yeah, that's fun. Let's talk about the report, because I heard about this report from the Work podcast. I dove into it. I was like, this is so interesting. I'd never seen anything like it in effectiveness research. So what motivated you to take this data-driven approach to music and what were the questions you were hoping to answer through this study?
Roscoe: Yeah. Well, I think if we look at effectiveness in music and sound, there's one area of it that is now a little bit more mature, I would say, which is the study of distinctive assets with sound. So sonic logos, sonic cues, as we all know, there's many different words for distinctive assets, right? But let's call them sonic logos, for example. And in 2020, Ipsos did, actually it was driven by a guy called Alex Sheridan over at Ipsos and did a fantastic study called The Power of View, which really showed across, you know, tens of thousands of US TV commercials that it was sonic distinctive assets, sonic logos that were eight and a half times more likely to drive brand attention than any other distinctive assets during that test, right?
So we're talking visual logos, we're talking colors, we're talking mascots, celebrities, for example. Which was pretty astonishing. So that created a lot of buzz and noise and was responsible for quite a lot of new interest in the area. And then recently, this year, System1 have actually rerun a similar test and found that again, sonic assets are the most likely to increase brand fluency, more than double than all the others. So again, it's back on the radar. But the thing is that it's relatively simple to pre-test and post-test for short, distinctive assets.
What's harder to do is all the other music that's out there, the longer form and whilst there's more of that music than there ever has been, there's more areas that a brand might be playing that music than there ever has been, it's such a black hole in terms of effectiveness. And we all kind of instinctively know that music is a really important part of a campaign and how emotional it is. And yet it's always very underserved in terms of the research. So really we set forth to ask the question, what are the key drivers of effectiveness when it comes to longer form music, which that leads us to the IPA effectiveness study. Yeah.
Elena: I know that you were measuring these four key metrics. How did you land on those and what did they tell you about how music actually works in advertising?
Roscoe: So we did this two ways. Firstly, we leveraged our kind of global talent internally. So we have teams all over syncing music daily, creating music daily, and we really wanted to understand what they felt were the key drivers of success. And then we then went to our partners, particularly, Professor Daniel Müllensiefen who was at Goldsmiths University in London at the time and is now at Hamburg and he's one of the leading experts on music in the mind. And he's worked extensively in media and advertising as well. And so he helped us, together with the IPA and Les Binet, to really start to validate these four in terms of music, cognition, emotional processing, long-term encoding. And if we look at the four that we talk about, we talk about engagement being fundamentally, how much does the music catch your attention and pull you in? Emotional fit? Now fit's an interesting one 'cause many people go, oh, is that brand fit? But actually what we wanted to look at was fit to picture. So how well does the music actually support the narrative and the picture? And surprise? How much does it cut through, stand out, feel incongruous, but kind of right? And recall, how easy is this music for us to stay with us afterwards. So those are the four that we looked at and that together, I guess they come, they're the kind of psychological engine behind it really.
Elena: So when you looked at those four, you found some pretty interesting things. Can you walk us through some of the findings?
Roscoe: Yeah. So I think just to pull out a little bit around the IPA involvement here and Les Binet been obviously Les being an absolute kind of legend of the effectiveness industry. I think what was, you know, what was amazing was to be able to take the IPA cases and take the 100 and I think it's 130 plus films, spread across those cases, all different sectors, and have the econometric data, have all of that business and brand performance data that the IPA have there for us. And then we were able to then cross reference how essentially seven and a half thousand people were evaluating the films across those four metrics that I just spoke about.
And then there's a lot of essentially number crunching under the guidance of both Les and Professor Daniel Müllensiefen to make sure that everything is non-biased and accurate to really look at what are the correlations, the causations between those and the business outcomes. And what we found was really quite startling really. So when we talk about engagement and how much the music pulls you in, the most driver that changed most really here was return on media investment. So the most engaging music could actually double the return on media investment, which is pretty staggering really, but as an average, very good engaging music increased it by up to 32%.
So when you start to think about the total spend of a campaign and you start to think about the fact that the most engaging music was shown to double the return on media investment, and yet how virtually nobody is isolating this driver, it's pretty startling in terms of the amount of money or risk really that's being left on the table for the higher end of the kind of campaign spectrum. And we found these findings time and time again. Now, that was return on media investment, which is one of the most kind of hard hitting, but there's some other really interesting ones as well. So fit, how well the music fits picture increased the willingness to pay. So a kind of premium factor by up to seven times for the most highly fitting music.
And I guess when you think about it, and it came out in some of the qualitative comments as well, that people just perceived the spot to be of high quality or the product, because the music was so well tightly fitting. And then the final two, so surprise and recall, so surprise led to increasing brand fame. In fact, the most surprising piece of music were up to five times more likely to drive brand fame, and recall increased the salience by up to four times. And so of course, some of the music hit these different factors more than once or twice or three times, and you can play with these. But yeah, I think what it shows is that it's definitely not a nice to have, it's a genuine driver of effectiveness and now at least we have some data pointing at how it's doing that. You see what I mean?
Elena: Yeah, that's amazing. And probably a huge untapped opportunity for brands too, that they could make this much of a difference in their ads, yet not a lot of marketers are even aware of it. Could you share an example? I know there's a couple brands in this study, an example of a brand where music really transformed the impact of their ad.
Roscoe: Yeah. I mean, if I'm being really, really strict to myself, to say that they transformed them, I would have to do AB tests with a piece of music, but the ones that we know scored really well, and we can look at our qualitative information from our study and we can see that users are attributing a lot of this feedback to the music. So two stand out. Number one being Costa Coffee advert, I don't know if you guys have Costa, but it's definitely UK, big UK coffee chain. And the spot was called A Nation of Costa Lovers, and it has a rerecording in it of Kiss. I was made for loving you, with a group of just random people's heads poking out the top of a coffee. I mean, it's a bizarre spot.
But the music's amazing because it's this rerecord version done by just general normal people, but it's a song that we know. And what it did is it hit both surprise and recall really well. And I think if you are a marketer or you are creative in an agency and you're thinking about how you hit both surprise and recall really, really well then doing rerecording, reimagination, reinterpretations of existing music is a really strong way to do that. And the second one I wanna pull out is KFC, Believe in Chicken. This was a KFC Christmas campaign. And really what's going on is there's a chef in the commercial kitchen. And it's all quite festive, but what you've got going on in the background is Puccini's Nessun Dorma, and I guess there's this kind of incongruence between the fact that somebody's making KFC chicken and this incredibly famous, beautiful piece of classical music, and it works. Like it just stays with you. And I think what we found with the surprise was that music that makes the viewer, the audience kind of think twice and go, oh, that kind of works. I don't really know why it works. It shouldn't work, but it does. That then tends to stay with the audience and hence, it helps to drive brand fame. So I would say those two standouts. But there's many great examples in the study.
Angela: I think many of us have probably experienced, I know my husband over the weekend, he always calls it an earworm if he gets something that he can't let go of and it's driving him crazy. So clearly the power of music is so powerful. Roscoe, I'd love to jog back to something you mentioned earlier, which was that one of the elements of the study was just how much does the music capture your attention and pull you in emotionally? And the research found that highly engaging music can double your marketing performance. So, in your view, what makes music highly engaging, especially in an ad context?
Roscoe: Yes. So there's a few things here. It's music that in some way emotionally feels engaging in terms of the type of emotion that it's portraying. How that is contrasting potentially to what's going on screen, the structure of that music. So music that maybe starts quieter and builds and lifts and has tension, the lyrical content as well can drive engagement as well. Is that fitting to the picture in some way? Is it being clever in a way that's understated? I think that engagement can also be where the music kind of has some slightly unexpected turns as well that can keep pulling the listener in. How well is it crafted? Does it feel like wallpaper or is it more intentional? So there's many different ways that we can look at engaging, but ultimately it boils down to, for our testing panel, how well does the music draw your attention in.
Angela: Fascinating. Love that there's so much depth to think about there. You know, we as effectiveness evangelists love the empirical rigor in the research. You mentioned it's important to be non-biased and accurate, and we have to look at correlations and causations. You worked with Les who's a bit of a grandfather on how to do this well in the industry on this paper. What did you learn from that collaboration about how to measure creative effectiveness with more rigor?
Roscoe: So much stuff. It was a real honor for the team to work, you know, Les and I think really Les really helped us to anchor everything in the IPA metrics. ROI, pricing, power, fame, salience, long-term business effects. I think also he made sure that we kind of stayed away from, oh yeah, this is interesting call to steer us more towards, does this actually change how people should think and behave? 'Cause if not, then let's leave it out. There's a sort of brutal efficiency that I've noticed with Les. And we both talked at the IPA conference this year in London. And I witnessed Les's slides and literally I know how much work's gone into the research that he was doing on budgets, et cetera.
And yet, you know, when Les presents, there's barely anything on the slides. It's a kind of ultra minimalistic, but the way that he communicates and the way that he can get his point across by having less information really, really kind of inspiring. So that was good. Clarity wins, I think is the lesson there. So, yeah, it was great to work with Les on that.
Angela: Well in the role of a CMO is so complex, so that ability to just distill it down into those simple principles and allow the marketing world to leverage that, it's so great to have bodies like the IPA and yourself to help support marketers on these moves that will move a brand in the direction we all wanna go. If you were advising a CMO that's listening today related to music and advertising, where should they start? What should that strategy look like?
Roscoe: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, if you're spending over, let's say a million on a campaign, either in total, which is not a huge budget in the grand scheme of things, then testing should be in my, well, not mine, but our opinion, non-negotiable, should be mandated because you are essentially gambling potentially a six or seven figure output on personal taste or the taste of the agency's taste, for example. And of course, that taste is hugely important and we're not saying that the agency shouldn't make the decision, the music, because, but why not go into that with some data behind it? So that's one thing.
I think the other thing is if you can't really define the sound of your brand internally to your team, to your agency, then I think you're missing a trick. And what we mean by define the sound of your brand is do you have some guidance on curation for your social media content? Do you have some guidance on your curation for your licensing for more of your flagship content? Do you have a sound? Can you stop somebody in the street or in your industry if you're a B2B, and say, well, what is the sound of your brand? 'Cause if not, then you probably should be asking those questions really. And my advice is to start small, start with the most impactful areas, but start working with specialist companies to start building out guidance and assets that can help increase your effectiveness basically.
Rob: Roscoe, it really goes without saying that my taste is far superior than Angela's. But many would say that music is a subjective thing. So when you're dealing with subjectivity, that can be challenging when you're trying to sell ideas. But this study really offers a lens of objectivity that you can use to approach this kind of work. What does that look like in practice?
Roscoe: Yeah. So having worked in this industry for well over a decade, probably a decade and a half now, I understand the decision making process that goes on and sometimes that can be democratic or sometimes there can be some element of I guess testing and thinking that goes into it, but so often it is the strongest opinion in the room who gets the music choice across the line. And I think that in certain situations that can pull off and that can be fine and that can work. But in other situations, that inherent subjectivity that is often driven by the most senior person in the room can actually be really detrimental to the outcome of the campaign, particularly as we start to see more and more data coming through like this study that shows that actually this is quite tangible in terms of some of the levers that you can pull on it. So the question then becomes, why wouldn't you start to want to test some of this stuff upfront, A, B, C, D, different types of music testing to eliminate some of that subjectivity. And I think the defense of creative choice and creativity, it can actually be a supportive driver of creativity because if you are a creative and you've got a pretty wild card music selection choice that your client's going, what on earth are you thinking with this?
If you're coming with some data that goes, well, actually no, this is over indexing on surprise and recall. So you can use it to your advantage. And I think that agency side, clients will be quite pleasantly surprised with how it can support their creative ideas.
Rob: Love that. Bring the data to sell the big idea and the pretesting of that as well to help support those great ads. You did a great job of taking us through the years of how music has played a role in advertising all the way from the jingle era to the ecosystem of sonic branding. Where's it going? If you were gonna go 10 years from now, you're talking like you're talking now and you're revealing the latest study, where's it going?
Roscoe: Ooh, that's a great question. Yeah, that is a question we were asking ourselves every day at the moment. And of course, the elephant in the room here is generative AI music. Because I think we would be remiss not to discuss generative AI music in the fold, and I would say in 10 years time, the fragmentation that has already happened over the last couple of decades in terms of how brands reach consumers, platforms, et cetera, is only gonna proliferate more. I don't see that stopping. And so therefore it is about how do you have more consistency, more personalization over a kind of plethora of micro moments. And how do you oversee that? So how do you have some more governance on that and how do you look at the effectiveness of that at scale?
So everything from, yeah, what sonic branding becomes in the future. That'll probably be smaller and smaller moments and more fragmented and more like a sonic language, so to speak, to if you've got thousands of influencers who are making content with you. And we know some of the big conglomerate clients are going heavy on influencer marketing and we're seeing some of the data coming out about the effectiveness of that in terms of brand building actually, which is quite interesting marketing. So how do you have some kind of guidance or guardrails over the type of music that they're using? And so I think what we'll see is a combination of different forms of music, generative AI music, license music, production music, everything in between, commercial music. But I would imagine in 10 years time that brands are gonna really want to have a much better handle on how that stuff is performing in real time out in the market and being able to, almost like with a dashboard, being able to kind of oversee that and quantify that and make tweaks in real time. I would say that's probably where we're going with it.
Rob: Amazing level of sonic intelligence and yet, it's really hard to even think 10 years out with what's going on with AI and its impact on the creator. So that's a great perspective to bring to the table. Alright, we love good contrarian viewpoints on this podcast. I have to imagine you have a few. What's your biggest?
Roscoe: If you think about the soundtrack as essentially probably carrying maybe even more than half of the effectiveness of a spot, and yet how grossly underlooked that is, again, going back to my earlier point, if you're spending large amounts of money or even medium amounts of money on a campaign and you're not testing it, then you are risking, you're gambling six to seven figures of outcome on subjectivity. And I would say my other point is that the industry is still visually obsessed, almost to a fault. It needs to balance that out with some more sonic obsession.
Rob: You are a brother from another mother. We've talked about that on this podcast. That's awesome.
Elena: Yeah, just the importance of that. I love it. We need to be more sonic obsessed. I wanted to wrap up with something kind of fun. In your opinion, Roscoe, this might be the hardest question of the podcast. What is the best song of all time?
Roscoe: Yeah, weirdly, it didn't take me long to come to this answer. And it's Frank Sinatra's version of My Way. Oh yeah, yeah.
Elena: That's a great one.
Roscoe: So I actually, and again, it's very fortunate that none of you were there to hear it, but I actually sung this song at my wedding. So yeah, so it holds an emotional point for me. But what's interesting about this song is structurally, it keeps building and building and building and thinking about engagement, thinking about how much that it pulls you in is incredible. Yeah. And it can work at weddings, right? It can work at funerals, it can work in films, it can work in advertising. And I think the other thing about the song is that if you listen to it at different parts in your life, right? If you listen to it in your twenties and then you listen in your forties, you listen in your sixties or seventies, actually, I'm pretty sure it hits in different places according to where you are in your life. And I think that is the marker of a really amazing piece of music, how it can be so multifaceted, right? And appeal to people in different ways. So yeah, there you go.
Rob: So you guys know Jason Bateman? Obviously the actor Jason Bateman, his father-in-law wrote that song.
Roscoe: Oh, oh, there we go.
Rob: My team of elves told me that.
Roscoe: That is amazing. That is amazing. Yeah. That's a great tune.
Elena: Yeah. Rob Ann, did you have a song to share? You're not as qualified as Roscoe, but—
Angela: No, not at all. Not even close. It's not as sophisticated. I love Eye of the Tiger. I too think it's multifaceted. It can have a lot of application. Rob, what's yours?
Rob: This is where I prove I have better taste in music. No, I'm joking. That's a great song. Mine is a bit obscure and I had to think about this. This wasn't as easy was for Roscoe. But if I had to capture a song, I'm gonna go with Two Out of Three Ain't Bad by Meatloaf.
Angela: Oh.
Rob: A little rock opera. And just like sonic branding, rock opera is very underappreciated. And Meatloaf's lungs are just amazing. And the irony in that song, when you listen to that sweet melody and then actually listen to the lyrics, you're like, wow, okay, alright. This isn't a love song at all, even though you think you're listening to a love song the whole time.
Roscoe: Yeah, so I need to go and listen to that straight away. Thank you for reminding me of that one.
Elena: Yeah, I went the opposite of the purpose of the show. I went totally subjective for my choice. I picked Purple Rain by Prince, but I do think that's a great song. But Prince is our Minnesota connection. He lived just like 15 minutes from me. It has one of the greatest guitar solos ever. It became a part of this movie, Purple Rain. And one of my favorite Prince stories is during when he did a Super Bowl halftime show, it was raining so hard they came up to him and said, hey, we think you shouldn't go on. It's too dangerous out there. And he said, can you make it rain harder? And then he went out there and performed Purple Rain in the rain.
Rob: That is awesome.
Elena: Just iconic moments with that song. But Roscoe, thank you so much for joining us today. This was so fun. Learned a lot. Where can people follow you and learn more about what you're doing at Massive Music?
Roscoe: Yeah, so massivemusic.com. And we're on all the socials. We're on Insta, LinkedIn, et cetera. So yeah, check us out there.
Elena: Love it.
Angela: So great to have you.
Elena: Yeah. Thank you.
Roscoe: Yeah. Thank you so much.
Rob: Thank you, Roscoe. That was awesome.