THE AMPLY EDIT: SEPTEMBER EDITION
The smartest music marketing ideas we spotted this month.
From turning a 28-year-old hit into a Candy Crush world to filming a music video live inside Roblox, September delivered plenty of reminders that the best music marketing doesn’t just promote the thing. It finds a more interesting way to make people care about it.
Here’s what caught our attention.
SHANIA TWAIN + ZEDD TURN A CLASSIC INTO A CANDY CRUSH WORLD
How do you introduce a nearly 30-year-old song to a new generation? Apparently, you give it a power-up.
Shania Twain and Zedd teamed up to rework You’re Still the One for Candy Crush, with the collaboration extending far beyond a traditional sync.
The track became the soundtrack to Candy Country, a new interactive in-game world, accompanied by a Jonas Åkerlund-directed music video and rewards including the chance to meet the artists on tour.
It’s smart catalogue marketing because the original song isn’t simply being resurfaced. It’s being given a new context, a new collaborator and a new reason to exist in culture almost three decades later.
WHAT TO STEAL FOR YOUR NEXT CAMPAIGN
Don’t just remind people that catalogue exists. Give it a new job. A collaboration, format or cultural context can create another entry point without trying to recreate the original moment.
YOUNG RODDO SHOOTS HIS MUSIC VIDEO INSIDE ROBLOX
Why build a set when your audience has already built you an entire world?
EMPIRE artist Young Roddo filmed the official video for Robux entirely inside Roblox’s Brookhaven, inviting fans to join the shoot and appear in the video in real time.
More than 540,000 people attended the live event.
The execution works because nothing about the platform feels arbitrary. Roddo is already a Brookhaven player, the song itself references Robux, and fans weren’t simply being asked to watch a gaming-themed music video. They could actually be part of making it.
WHAT TO STEAL FOR YOUR NEXT CAMPAIGN
Start with where the artist and their audience already behave naturally. When the platform is genuinely part of the artist’s world, the marketing idea tends to feel a lot less like marketing.
JAY-Z TAKES THE BLUEPRINT INTO LONDON
FA stadium show gives you thousands of people in one place. A good campaign asks what you can do with the rest of the city.
Around JAY-Z’s London dates, JAY-Z 30 expanded into a series of physical experiences celebrating three decades of his career.
A Camden pop-up combined limited merchandise with nightly sets from UK DJs including Semtex and Target, before a five-day Trafalgar Square installation recreated the world around The Blueprint through archive material, performances, physical music, merchandise and period TVs.
Rather than treating the live dates as the end product, the campaign used them as the anchor for a much bigger cultural moment in the market.
WHAT TO STEAL FOR YOUR NEXT CAMPAIGN
Tour dates are marketing moments. If an artist is already bringing attention, fans and media into a priority market, look at what can happen around the show as well as on the stage.
SPOTIFY MAKES ITS BILLBOARDS WORTH STEALING
Spotify’s latest Fan Life campaign did something unusual with outdoor advertising: it actively encouraged people to take it apart.
Perforated posters allowed fans to tear pieces of the campaign away and keep them, with some featuring artist signatures.
It taps into something music fans have been doing forever: collecting physical evidence of their fandom. Posters disappear from venues. Setlists mysteriously leave stages. Ticket stubs end up in drawers for decades.
Instead of trying to manufacture a new behaviour, Spotify turned an existing one into the media idea.
WHAT TO STEAL FOR YOUR NEXT CAMPAIGN
Look at what fans already do without being asked. Those behaviours can be far more interesting creative territory than inventing another mechanic and asking people to participate in it.
G-DRAGON PUTS KOREAN CULTURE ON THE McDONALD’S MENU
G-Dragon and McDonald’s Korea have taken the artist meal somewhere considerably more interesting than putting a celebrity’s usual order in a box.
Their collaboration centres on a new Gochujang Butter menu, alongside limited-edition packaging and merchandise created with G-Dragon’s fashion label PEACEMINUSONE.
The campaign originated in Korea but is being rolled out across 13 Asian markets, turning something culturally specific into a regional proposition rather than sanding the edges off it for international consumption.
It’s a useful reversal of how global campaigns often work: local market creates the idea, cultural specificity gives it value, and then it travels.
WHAT TO STEAL FOR YOUR NEXT CAMPAIGN
International doesn’t have to mean making an idea more generic. Sometimes the thing that makes a campaign exportable is precisely what makes it culturally specific in the first place.
KATSEYE GIVES HERSHEY’S A READY-MADE FAN SIGNAL
Hershey’s partnership with KATSEYE didn’t begin by inventing a new branded dance, hashtag or catchphrase.
Instead, it borrowed something fans already knew.
The campaign for Hershey’s new Creme Bars uses KATSEYE’s Pinky Up song and recognisable hand gesture as its creative hook, ext
ending into physical sampling and pop-up experiences.
It’s a small distinction that makes a big difference. Hershey’s isn’t asking KATSEYE to temporarily behave like a chocolate brand. It has found an existing piece of the group’s language that happens to work for the product.
WHAT TO STEAL FOR YOUR NEXT CAMPAIGN
Before creating something new for an artist partnership, look at what already belongs to the artist. Existing lyrics, gestures, visual codes, in-jokes and fan behaviours can give a brand a much more credible way in.
MIND BATH RELEASES AN ALBUM YOU CAN READ
While everyone else searches for another vinyl colour, Mind Bath took the physical-product conversation somewhere rather different.
The artist released Aqueous simultaneously as an album and debut companion novel, with the two designed as parts of the same conceptual project. Album performances and book-launch events then brought both formats together in the real world.
There’s nothing technologically groundbreaking about a book. That’s rather the point.
At a time when physical music campaigns can default to increasingly elaborate versions of the same products, Aqueous shows that the interesting question isn’t necessarily what else can we sell? It’s what else could this record become?
WHAT TO STEAL FOR YOUR NEXT CAMPAIGN
Physical doesn’t have to mean another deluxe vinyl variant. Think about what object, format or medium could genuinely add another layer to the artist’s world.
UNTIL NEXT MONTH
Seven campaigns. Seven very different ideas.
And that’s probably the useful bit.
The strongest music marketing this month didn’t come from one platform, format or playbook. It came from finding the idea that made sense for that artist, that audience and that moment.
We’ll be back next month with another edit of the campaigns worth stealing from.
Less chaos. More chorus.
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