Your Love Won't Pay My Bills
Branding and sponsorship in music is reaching an all time high. How do you tell the difference between 'good' and 'bad' money?
I’ve become deeply involved in finding and securing brand partnerships which can bring funding to the grassroots music venue sector. This is still a comparatively new area of work, because until the Music Venues Alliance came into existence in 2015 there simply wasn’t any method by which brands could seek to engage with the 900 plus venues across the country, who still remain, whilst united within the Alliance, fiercely independent and run by mavericks. Unless you wanted to try and track down over 900 phone numbers and emails, then seek to do individual deals with each and every one of them, there wasn’t any possibility to do any sort of network deal which demonstrated genuine reach into the grassroots ecosystem.
The result of this was that the substantial gap between the funding and finances for concert halls, arenas, stadiums and festivals, which were already financially supported by larger capacities, higher ticket prices, and increased per head spend, was further extended by branding and partnership on just about every level of the business. The O2 Arena, for example, is partnered by the O2 network, obviously, and (take a deep breath) American Express, Budweiser, GoPuff, Stellantis, Britvic, Nestle, Nordic Spirit, DHL, AXS, Proximo, Rentokil, Peninsula Partners, Radox, Accolade, Coventry University Group, Greenwich Council, Greenwich Local Labour and Business, and World Heritage. The Hull Adelphi, meanwhile, isn’t. I’m not sure they would want to be, but somewhere within the branding envelope there should be space for a partnership which would provide financial stability to that iconic local community venue as much as there is for the UK’s largest arena.
The question of sponsorship or branding in music is already a tough and divisive one. Artists themselves have very strong views about it, although those views will often be highly flexible dependent upon the amount of money involved and how informed the artist is on the package of deals, brands, sponsorship and partnerships which might be taking place around their performance. I once had to sell a deal to an artist which was plainly outside their comfort zone right up until I told them the amount, at which point they were remarkably calm, if not positively enthusiastic, about it. Equally, I recently dealt with an artist who was uncomfortable with the source of the funding which was making their grassroots shows possible. That same artist had just come off a tour which had used three larger venues sponsored by the exact same source, and for far more substantial sums, without any issues being raised.
The grassroots music venue sector not only desperately needs much greater levels of funding, it is actually a prime piece of real estate in which partnerships and branding at a national level, delivered locally, make a huge amount of sense. In 2022 the sector moved 22 million tickets to an estimated 6.5 million individuals. That’s a huge market that brands want to tap into, made all the more attractive by the fact that the customer base is typified by age ranges, attitudes, and spending patterns which places it into the ‘difficult to reach’ category. The size of the Music Venues Alliance means that it is not only the biggest network of allied music specialists in the country, it is also, right now, the largest body of licensed premises with a single representative organisation with which a brand partnership can be struck. If you’re a beer company reading this you probably want to have a think about that and find my number. Most importantly of all, the sector exhibits a very key characteristic which brands find irresistible; the grassroots music venue ecosystem is the very definition of authentic. This places it firmly into the centre of the market for ‘affinity’ branding and partnerships; putting your product or service alongside an opportunity which tells the audience that you share their values.
It is this authenticity, the feeling held by the audience that these are the venues where real, direct, visceral experiences take place, that is the factor that brands are most keen to be associated with. The reason it exists is because authenticity is built deeply into the DNA of the venue operators, and a prime motivation for the venue existing in the first place. However, that authenticity comes with an in-built flaw. The vast majority of venue operators would prefer to accept no branding or sponsorship at all; their independence from branding, sponsors and commercial affiliations is a core element of their motivations for doing business.
Unfortunately, the economic reality is it is no longer possible for them to continue to deliver the programme and services they want without external funding or financial partnerships. Reading this you may feel that funding for these types of venues should be a key concern for the public purse. The Government recently announced £5 million extra for the grassroots sector, which is warmly welcome and remarkable given the pressures on the public purse. A good rule of thumb when trying to make positive change is not to spend too much time asking people to do things if you know they cannot, or will not, do them. We are at the limit of what the current government feels able to do. Realistically, after their £5 million we are still something in the region of £15 million short of where we need to be for financial stability for the sector. The most likely source of that required income in the present economic climate is significant commercial brands and partners.
To work around their mixed feelings towards sponsorship and branding, many venue operators have sought to do deals with entities that they regard as ‘less corporate, more independent’. This is a largely artificial test which, like that considered by artists, is substantially based on the amount of money involved and how aware the venue is of where the money is really coming from. This is particularly true in the ticketing market, where venue operators maintain deals with partners on the basis of the ‘independent’ ownership of the ticketing company long after the company has been absorbed into a corporate structure the venue apparently opposes. I have dealt with a venue who did not want to accept a specific type of brand funding because of its source who were, by the time you finished working your way through the obscure ownership of various entities, effectively tenants of the same entity enjoying greatly reduced rent as an ongoing benevolent act. They didn’t want the single show because of who was sponsoring it, but they were content to take the largesse of the same organisation across their entire programme because they just hadn’t understood that was happening.
The result of all this is we have a sector in desperate need of funding, exhibiting characteristics and qualities which are highly attractive to brands and partners, but who are extremely reluctant to accept the funding if it is offered. Somehow we are trying to navigate our way through that process on their behalf, balancing what venue operators would really like (lots of new money without any strings attached) with what brands and partners will naturally position themselves to try to obtain (as little money as possible for the maximum coverage). And that’s just the first part of the conundrum.
For all the reasons listed above, venue operators are highly sensitive to the question of exactly who the brand partner is, what they stand for and what their record is on a multitude of issues from climate change through to historic associations with malpractice or support for barbaric regimes. I am trying to represent those views, but it is not a simple black and white issue. In reality it is not even as simple as a series of black and white issues, just about every aspect of it is an incredibly murky soup of greyness.
What do we do if a brand that is incredibly active in the music industry already, sponsorship money all over tours, shows and even albums, has an owner who holds political views that are not just questionable they are outright extreme? What do we do if a brand which is in just about every venue and festival in the world, underwriting the profitability of those events with special deals and partnerships even when it is not named as a headline sponsor, has a record on the climate crisis which is terrible? What do we do about brands which are considered to be working in increasingly contentious areas, like gambling, alcohol, smoking or vaping? What about a brand with a poor human rights record? What about a brand which does business in a country with a poor human rights record? Do we turn down a deal with these brands even when artists, venues, festivals and promoters are queuing up to strike deals with them, including for tours on which the public facing positions of the artist on a range of issues is facing 180 degrees in the opposite direction from the brand?
Land Rover sponsor Glastonbury. That potentially sounds bad. It’s their electric vehicles. That sounds better. The electric vehicles use inappropriate amounts of the world’s resources to be built. That sounds worse. They are powered by specially installed solar panels. That sounds better. Those solar powers are very likely built in China. That doesn’t sound quite as good. They are possibly made with Uighur slave labour. Oh.
The inter-connectivity of the world, and its hidden corporate structure of ownership, means that it possible to criticise almost every brand deal done between almost every entity for almost every possible reason. The only way to avoid the accusation that you’ve ‘done the wrong deal with the wrong company’ is to not do the deal at all. The result of that approach would be that large corporate entities in the music industry would continue to mop up sponsorship while grassroots music venues continue to close. Which I don’t think is acceptable. At all.
Plainly there are going to be some companies with which it would not be possible to do a deal without selling your soul to the devil. The question is, which companies are inside the circle of who you can deal with and which are outside. The answer to that question is going to be different for every person reading this column and thinking about these challenges. It’s going to depend on which particular issues facing the world they feel are the most important or urgent. It’s going to depend on how much they know about any company ownership, the people who work there, the part of the structure you are dealing with, the things the company already does, the specific product they are promoting, the subsidiary status of the partner you are working with, the intent of the person or team you are dealing with, and yes, uncomfortable as it may be to be honest about it, it will be impacted by the size of the deal.
That last bit is interesting to me, because I recently announced a deal which some people, for justifiable reasons they strongly believe in, did not like. I’m content for them to be critical of it, but it does raise an important point about who, what and when we should direct criticism at. If I manage to do deals for the full £15 million required, it would still pale into insignificance compared to existing deals already live in the marketplace between brands and music. We are a grassroots up movement with the expectation of a high level of ethical and moral standards. It is highly likely, therefore, that a deal we do which is for even one tenth of the amount already being pushed into the marketplace by the brand we are partnering with will attract ten times the level of debate and discussion.
The deal I haven’t yet accepted, taking into account all the above factors, is a deal with Viagogo. Now, if you’re in the music industry you probably reared back in horror simply on reading that name, the world’s largest secondary ticket provider, considered by the live sector to be only slightly less of a pantomime villain than Captain Hook. An entire music industry body exists pretty much for the sole remaining purpose of shutting them down or, at least, reducing the scale and scope of their business to a tiny, smouldering lump of little consequence. Of course, I’m obviously not going to consider accepting a brand partnership with Viagogo… am I?
Well, currently the grassroots music sector receives no investment whatsoever from the sale of the biggest value tickets to the biggest events, the very basis on which Viagogo make their money. I have suggested that this really needs to change, but at the moment the various parties that could make that happen are all engaged in a Mexican stand off, pointing at each other suggesting that only someone else can make it happen. My job is to make it happen. Ask yourself the question: How long would you continue to turn down a meeting with Viagogo when they keep shouting that they can make it happen and are prepared to do it? How long would you continue to turn it down when the people who are telling you it would be the worst possible thing to do, completely unacceptable, are also the people who are choosing not to take action they can very easily take when venues are closing down at a rate of one a week?
The best I can offer you on this is that I approach branding and partnerships determined to consider all the various factors and committed to representing the views of grassroots music venues as best as I can during negotiations. I can’t guarantee that you won’t be annoyed or saddened by some of the decisions we might make, I can only be honest and say that we have done the utmost we can to defend the authenticity of the sector while making the best, most impactful, ethical and moral deal possible. Sometimes you won’t like the outcome, but out intentions are allied closely with the views of the sector. They will always be driven by the knowledge that we have to take action to get money into these venues and stop them being closed down.
And in that mission, I suspect our aim is always aligned with your own views. Even if you sometimes distrust or dislike the method.
Happy to help and give substantial support and discounts to bonefide independent venues who want to improve their sound systems but are struggling with budgets.. Reach out to me at andrew@bishopsound.com.