Tag: sports
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What can the music industry learn from sports and other sectors?

Avatar photo by Stuart Dredge

Creative and effective digital marketing isn’t just a priority within the music business: it’s a discipline that’s playing an important role across most industries now.

At Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global online conference yesterday, we had outside-music marketing experts talking about their campaigns and lessons, as well as some music marketers explaining how they take inspiration beyond our sector.

The former included Richard Ayers, chair of Seven League and founder of Rematch, and one of the most respected marketing executives in the sports industry.

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Exploring lessons from sports for the music industry at Sandbox Summit Global

Avatar photo by Music Ally

The opening keynote for this year’s Sandbox Summit Global conference is a digital veteran in the true sense of the word. Richard Ayers’ CV includes stints in digital media across all forms of entertainment including music, film, book publishing, online news and newspapers.

He helped launch BBC News Online back in 1997, ran an entertainment portal (remember when there were such things as portals?) for Tiscali in the early 2000s, and headed up digital business development for the British Film Institute in the latter half of the same decade.

But it was after a two week consultancy for the then-fledgling digital operations of Manchester City FC turned into a full-time position that Ayers really made his name, ultimately becoming something of a digital guru in the sports world, particularly with football clubs.

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Defected Records and Heineken get ready for a football party

Avatar photo by Stuart Dredge

The Covid-elongated European football season isn’t over just yet: the next three weeks will see the Champions League and Europa League tournaments play out their remaining rounds.

Now one of football body UEFA’s key sponsorship partners Heineken has teamed up with dance label Defected Records to soundtrack the rejigged tournaments.

They’ll be holding an eight-hour livestream called ‘The Kick Off’ this Sunday (9 August) featuring eight DJs broadcasting from their homes or special locations. Bob Sinclar (one of our go-to cheer-up livestreamers during the early weeks of the Covid-19 lockdown) is one of the DJs, alongside Idris Elba, Purple Disco Machine, Low Steppa, Melvo Baptise, Aline Rocha, Ferreck Dawn and DJ Monki.

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Deezer launches Football Fever playlist takeover for World Cup

Avatar photo by Stuart Dredge

Football’s World Cup kicks off later this week, with 32 countries hoping for glory (or, in England’s case, hoping at least for something better than abject embarrassment and penalties ineptitude).

Deezer is on the bandwagon, launching a promotion called ‘Football Fever’ with playlists curated by local artists in each of the 32 participating nations. Kasabian are at the helm for England; Zara Larsson for Sweden; Davido for Nigeria and Mc Kevinho for Brazil, among others.

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Clickamix sees $670m opportunity in sports music-licensing

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A $670m pot of music-licensing revenue that hasn’t been tapped? That’s the kind of claim that gets rightsholders’ interest, although there’s a natural scepticism too when the goldmine is being quantified by a company whose business is focused on tapping that revenue stream.

Still, Clickamix is definitely worth investigating: it wants to work with publishers, artist managers and industry bodies to pre-clear music mixes for use in competitive sports.

Cheerleading is its first area of focus, and before sporting snobs snort, it’s been provisionally recognised as an Olympic sport, and could be part of the 2020 games in Tokyo.