Why brands are tapping the ‘cultural capital’ of musicians for product drops
Steve Soderholm, co-founder at the fragrance and candle company Ranger Station, has “an awesome problem.”
The company’s latest drop-in partnership, with musician Kelsea Ballerini, is outpacing anticipated sales just two weeks after launching on Oct. 15. The “Burn the Baggage” candle is named after one of Ballerini’s newest singles and features notes of iris — the state flower of her home state, Tennessee — as well as a unique jar emblazoned with the stages of processing grief. The first batch of sales came from new customers who are already adding other products to their carts, Solderholm said.
“One of the biggest wins is that it really opens up the Ranger Station brand to Kelsea’s whole audience, and it introduces our customers to her, as well,” he said. That crossover has been really fun to see. A lot of the initial sales came from brand-new customers, which is a huge win for us. So many of them had never heard of Ranger Station before.”
Ranger Station, a 10-year-old direct-to-consumer company based in Nashville, Tennessee, has averaged a 63% growth rate over the last four years. But it has found a niche collaborating with musicians on new products, including one with Noah Kahan and another with Waylon Jennings. These “feature” collections represent about 18% of the company’s total revenue. On launch days, the feature drops can generate sales as high as five figures, with site traffic that rivals Black Friday.
Ranger Station is among a cohort of brands seeing big awareness and sales wins when collaborating with musicians for special product drops. At a high level, Nike has done product drops with Travis Scott, Drake and Kendrick Lamar over the years, while the Boy Smells candle brand has done several candle scents with singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves. More recently, Dua Lipa announced in September that she’s the co-founder and chief creative officer of the Pilates brand Frame Fitness. Other recent drops include Dip, a sustainable hair-care brand, which put out a collaboration with the rock band Guster for the annual three-day music festival it headlines in Portland, Maine, called “Guster On The Ocean.”
These kinds of product drops can tap into musicians’ “cultural capital,” said Commie McMullen, executive creative director at Big Sync, a global music partner for brands, agencies and artists, and a subsidiary of MassiveMusic. McMullen’s work includes helping bridge relationships between artists and brands.
“If you can tell a good story behind why you’re doing it, not just in terms of, ‘We need someone to supply a soundtrack,’ and there’s a sort of mutual benefit, or mutual value, for each other, [it works],” McMullen said. He added that, while the brand is getting cultural capital, “equally, the artist is doing something they’re passionate about.”
Overall, instances of music and brands teaming up for creative partnerships are on the rise. Intelligence platform SponsorUnited analyzed more than 650 brands, 870 deals and 4,580 music artist social posts between April 2023 and April 2024, and found that musicians engaged with 11% more brands than they had the prior year. It also found an 84% surge in endorsements, defined as any kind of partnership, like traditional individual endorsements, charitable causes or artist-owned brands. “With the proliferation of social media and advances in streaming platforms, the top 200 music artists have collectively increased their follower count by 918 million — an increase of 8% — positioning them as more influential platforms than their peers in sports and other celebrities in entertainment,” the report found.
At the mainstream level, deals can also be incredibly lucrative; Grammy Award-winning rapper Doechii carried a media impact value of about $42.2 million for brand partners in 2024 alone, according to Launchmetrics. Her brand partners have included Nike, Samsung and Cash App, as well as Miu Miu and Louis Vuitton.
“I think that the concept of talent working with brands is established now, so what makes you stand out is how far you’re willing to push it, and how interesting and surprising you’re going to be,” McMullen said.
But there are risks and considerations with working with artists, McMullen said. For example, they’re less transactional than your standard influencer, and “the brand stuff comes second to their art.” He’s seen deals fall apart because the artist ultimately wasn’t connected to the product. But, he anticipates seeing more hands-on collaborations when like-minded brands and musicians come together. On the flip side, teaming up early with an artist on the rise can be “the biggest win.”
In some cases, partnerships between brands and musicians happen organically. Dip co-founder Kate Assaraf said she has “been a Guster fan since high school.” But she befriended lead singer Ryan Miller when her brand, which makes shampoo and conditioner bars, sponsored a Whalebone Magazine event that Miller was also involved in. That connection led to meeting Guster’s lead guitarist, Adam Gardner, who is the co-founder of sustainability nonprofit Reverb and resonated with Dip’s plastic-free mission. Dip only sells its products direct-to-consumer and in independently owned shops.
When it came time for the annual “Guster on the Ocean” festival in Portland, Maine this August, the band and brand teamed up to create a co-branded product line of shampoo and conditioner bars. The collaboration includes the shampoo bar “OoO La Lather,” named after Guster’s latest record, and a “One Bar Wrecking Machine” conditioner and after-swim bar. There’s also a Dip x Guster tobacco and driftwood-scented bar housed in a box reminiscent of Miller’s iconic patchwork jacket he wears for performances. At a meet-and-greet during the festival, Dip sold $5,000 worth of products, and they’re still being sold on the Guster merch site.
“So much hype is manufactured, so it’s really fun to have it be very real and have a human side of the story,” she said. “The non-corporate collabs are just more fun.”
Beyond the new product sales, Assaraf said boutiques and shops that sell her products are starting to see Guster fans come in to shop for Dip.
“They’re finding their local refill store, or they’ll go into a refill store and be like, ‘Oh my God, Dip! That’s the brand Guster loves,'” she said. “I have screenshots of store owners texting me saying someone came in because of Guster, and that’s really cool.”
Ranger Station’s Solderholm has found similar strengths in collaboration. People trust their favorite musicians because of their emotional attachment to their work and want to support their projects.
“People are starting to lose trust when they see just another influencer pushing another brand,” he said. “Our partnerships are more along the lines of, ‘Hey, this was just an honest, fun thing where we’re fans of each other, and it’s a fun project to tell this cool story through fragrance together.’ And I think people see the honesty in that.”