PRS for Music has teamed up with branding consultancy Frukt to calculate how much brands spent on music in the UK last year. The answer: £104.8m, up just over 6% from 2011. The largest slice went predictably to live music sponsorship with £33.2m, ahead of TV (£23.4m) and advertising support (£23m). And digital? The figures suggest that brands spent £10.3m on digital music campaigns in 2012, although this is the hardest category to break out for this kind of research, given that most live and TV music activity from brands includes some kind of digital element nowadays. The boundaries are blurring, too: Vevo’s AmEx Unstaged series appears to have been classed as ‘digital’, yet you could make an argument for it also being both ‘live’ (because it’s exclusive gigs for fans) and ‘TV’ (because it’s Vevo). In any case, it’s money flowing into music. “We’ve seen an increase in both the volume of activity and sophistication of platforms over the last five years and there are no signs of this changing,” says Frukt CEO Anthony Ackenhoff. “There’s a clear trend in brands wanting to take control of platforms and move away from traditional sponsorship – we’re really excited by this and see it as an opportunity to get even more creative.”
Source: PRS for Music
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