When used properly, music can be a powerful marketing tool, especially for retailers looking to attract a fashion-conscious millennial audience. Here are five retail brands nailing music marketing.

In the past year, we’ve started to see many fashion and accessories brands making their first foray into the world of music streaming. They’re taking the lead from the consumer technology, car and luxury brands that have already used music to deeply engage with their customers on an emotional level to build brand advocacy and to increase sales.

Today, music marketing is becoming a driving force in the fashion economy. This is because music and fashion are both artistic and aesthetically pleasing, and intertwining both in a live experience or digital world creates the most powerful emotional response from consumers.

Many of these brands are using music to help connect them with millennials, who are increasingly hard to reach as social media and other forms of digital entertainment fragment their attention.

Music’s allure as a marketing tool is growing for other reasons as well. Major concert promoters are offering corporate sponsors exposure to a growing global fan base as they snap up smaller promoters, expand internationally and live-stream more of their shows and festivals.

Below you will read how five leading retailers have successfully used the power of music as a marketing tool to deliver positive experiences and engage with their customers, including H&M, Very and Converse.

H&M uses music to drive brand stickiness across digital

Global Swedish fashion giant H&M fully embraces music and has run several music related campaigns, including a number of associations with both artists and festivals. Recently the retailer has hooked up with M.I.A. to raise awareness for World Recycle Week. As part of their efforts, M.I.A. launched a music video focusing on the environmental impact of clothes in landfills, which is available on H&M’s website.

H&M has successfully brought the fashion catalogue into the modern world in a campaign it ran in Asia last year, where users in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and mainland China were able to enjoy mixing their passion for fashion with music. H&M’s Fashion Mixer is an online display of the forty-three new designs in its collection. Each item comes with its own unique sound effect, created by a mix of local and international artists. Users can simply drop and drag items they like into the music mixer to create their own remixes, which can be shared on social sites along with the matched garments.

H&M has also launched a second Coachella collection that was available at the iconic festival this year.

Very uses music and data to drive a high ROI marketing campaign

UK clothing Retailer Very used music and data analytics in the highly successful #Summertime campaign. Very was able to latch onto its customers’ passion for hip-hop, and was able to grow brand affinity with its consumers, resulting in an ROI of six to one, for an investment of less than $500,000.

DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince (a.k.a. Will Smith) had one of the 90’s catchiest songs, ‘Summertime’, which was re-worked by London duo Rizzle Kicks for the Very’s first shoppable YouTube ad.

Using previously available customer data, this retail brand was able to determine which music genre and artist would most likely influence its target market. The genre and the overall vibe of the ad is what initially connects music fans emotionally with this ad. Everything seen in the video is available for purchase, with the top banner of the video displaying ‘shop this video’.

The first 10,000 fans who visited the Very site were also offered the exclusive ‘Summertime’ track. This exclusive content was appealing to music fans and was a great way to achieve high digital engagement.

Converse uses music to give back to its core demographic… the musicians

Converse’s approach to its entire music strategy has been a dedicated one. The brand has cleverly used music to gain a deep connection between brand-lovers and music fans. It created a global family of community-based professional recording studios, know as “Rubber Tracks”, where emerging musicians of all genres can apply for free studio time. Rubber Tracks was inspired by CMO, Geoff Cottrill, whose passion for music has helped direct marketing at Converse.

Converse gave these musicians the platform they needed, positioning the artists at the centre of its marketing campaign. What makes this campaign even more powerful is that Converse presented these artists as not just creative partners, but also as the core consumers of the brand. By consistently acknowledging how musical talent deserves the brand’s support, Converse owned musicians as a loyal audience.

Through music, Converse has differentiated its brand from other shoe manufacturers. This has helped the brand increase social media presence. It has more fans on its Facebook page (37.6 million) compared to Adidas (21.8 million) and Nike (23.4 million).

American Eagle has enhanced its image with playlists heard throughout its stores. In July 2015, the brand added a music streaming service to its mobile shopping app.

The goal was to boost in-app engagement and brand stickiness. American Eagle has reported that consumers who pushed play, spent more than triple the amount of time on the app as those who didn’t, while the number of users who returned within 30 days doubled. That all adds up to an overall increase in sales.

NAMM Members are now able to view the latest global trends and music products data in “The 2016 NAMM Global Report.” The annual report is created by the organization for its global membership and captures a snapshot of music industry sales figures from 24 countries, including unit sales information, analysis, and import/export numbers for musical instruments and products.

Aligned with NAMM’s mission to strengthen the music products industry, the report is designed to offer discerning industry trends and opportunities for NAMM Member businesses to shape their vision, business strategies and to seek out new markets. The report is compiled from independent data sources from around the world including The Music Trades magazine and The U.S. Census Bureau. This year’s Global Report is the most-comprehensive report from the organization to date, compiling data from 24 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

New bundled fee for retail music licensing

For retailers with floor space of up to 500sqm, there is now a discounted, bundled fee for background music instore. The new scheme was developed by the Australian Retailers Association (ARA) in partnership with APRA AMCOS and PPCA.

The scheme offers one, flat fee to play background music instore on an unlimited range of music devices. What would have cost up to $1,482 annually has been bundled together into one flat fee of $550 incl GST.

You can now be licensed to play music from CDs and smartphones as well as streaming devices, and for music in the workplace and ‘on hold’. Previously, if you were a store of this size you needed to take out a range of individual licenses, with both APRA AMCOS and PPCA to cover your varied music use. The ARA is now providing unlimited copying, unlimited devices, unlimited music on hold use and unlimited music in the workplace for a flat fee.

This scheme was developed with the ARA’s full input and will be administered by the ARA. One licence fee paid to the ARA means less paperwork, greater savings and easier compliance with copyright law.

The Australian media and entertainment industries have hit out in no uncertain terms at a bunch of copyright proposals put forward by the country’s Productivity Commission, which would increase copyright exceptions while possibly decreasing copyright terms.

The Australian government has already distanced itself from the latter proposal, ie the idea that the copyright term for literary, musical, artistic and dramatic works be cut from the current life-plus-70-years to something closer to 25 years after publication.

Though reps for the music, movie, TV and other copyright industries have been keen to state their opposition to pretty much everything else that appeared in the draft Productivity Commission report, as the department takes submissions ahead of publishing its final document later this summer.

Speaking for the record industry, the International Federation Of The Phonographic Industry took specific aim at the proposal that more fair dealing exceptions be introduced into Australian law, increasing the scenarios in which third parties can make use of copyright protected material without seeking permission or paying any royalties.

According to Torrentfreak, the IFPI wrote in a response to the Productivity Commission report: “Licensing, not exceptions to copyright, drives innovation. Innovation is best achieved through licensing agreements between content owners and users, including technological innovators … It is no coincidence that those who champion the ‘flexibility’ of fair use exceptions/defences typically are those whose business models depend on unfettered access to copyright works”.

Trade groups and big players from across the entertainment industry echo the IFPI’s concerns. Though, needless to say, there are those in other sectors who are more receptive to the Productivity Commission’s proposals, not least good old Google. In its submission, it notes that plenty of strong copyright regimes offer more exceptions than Australia currently does – not least the US – and that some of those exceptions, like the parody and news reporting exceptions, are exploited by the media and entertainment companies themselves.

It remains to be seen how many of the Productivity Commission’s proposals to date are still in the final report when it is handed to the Australian government next month.