In early April, as word spread that Red Bull Music Academy was shutting down after more than two decades, musicians and journalists found themselves in a curious position: mourning the loss of an energy drink sponsorship. Flying Lotus, an alumnus of the 2006 academy in Melbourne, tweeted his love to all involved. Hudson Mohawke, who attended the 2007 academy in Toronto, eulogized “maybe the only truly successful example of a corporate sponsored music/culture partnership.” Staunchly independent music website The Quietus even called RBMA “an antidote to the depersonalized aggregation of music and culture embodied by Spotify, YouTube, and others.” In the commercial desert that is underground music, somehow it was caffeinated sugar water that helped sustain an ecosystem.
RBMA’s demise seems to reflect the reality of corporate patronage in today’s flailing music industry. But the impressive legacy of this traveling music workshop/festival/conference demonstrates what a difference corporate largesse can make when the right people are given the reins. It is those people—Yadastar, the German marketing and consulting firm that effectively built RBMA—that Red Bull is parting ways with come Halloween. Together under the RBMA banner, the two companies have flown out young artists, producers, and DJs to a different city around the world almost every year since 1998. Yadastar’s work for Red Bull also includes a longform editorial website, the RBMA Daily, and a genre-defying online radio station, Red Bull Radio (formerly RBMA Radio), which regularly hosts artist-helmed programs. Guided by Yadastar, Red Bull’s sponsorship has nurtured the creative community with an artistic fearlessness that branding tie-ins almost always lack. From the outside, it has been a nice surprise to see the partnership flourish.
To be clear, Red Bull isn’t pulling out of the music industry altogether. In an April 3rd statement, the Austrian company suggested it would be continuing to “support promising and cutting-edge artists,” but through its satellite offices in individual countries instead of from its global headquarters. According to Resident Advisor, the Red Bull Music division, which wasn’t affiliated with Yadastar, will continue. The company’s music publishing arm, part of the Red Bull Media House, is currently hiring for a West Coast A&R director. And Red Bull Records, which leans a bit more mainstream than RBMA’s adventurous endeavors, is still kicking as well. The multi-city Red Bull Music Festival exists independently of RBMA, and while this year’s New York incarnation is currently underway, there’s no official word on what the future holds for the well-regarded event series.
It’s unclear how many people will lose their jobs as a result of the breakup, or what will happen to RBMA’s invaluable archives. (As Hua Hsu recently wrote in The New Yorker, “The closing was a reminder that much of contemporary culture is produced by companies that don’t see themselves as archivists, or as custodians for the future.”) A Red Bull spokesperson declined to comment to Pitchfork; Yadastar directed us to its earlier statement, which says that the decision to part ways was mutual. Numerous people I contacted who were familiar with the inner workings of Yadastar and RBMA declined to comment on the record.
One source familiar with the situation told me that Red Bull Radio asked for a budget increase and Red Bull responded by cutting the funding. “It obviously didn’t make any money,” this person said. According to the source, job losses are expected to extend beyond just Yadastar, to Red Bull corporate employees who had worked as liaisons with Red Bull Radio.
A single department asking for more money is an incidental anecdote in the larger scheme of things, of course. The simplest explanation as to why RBMA would close up shop now has to do with the type of work, and the timing of internal sea changes. Chief marketing officers average less than four years on the job, and music branding initiatives rarely last much longer. Comparatively, the 21-year relationship between Red Bull and Yadastar was exceptionally long in the tooth, not to mention elaborate. Like anything, it was going to end eventually.
There’s also a whole corporate line of reasoning that’s a bit more specific. Red Bull boss Dietrich Mateschitz will turn 75 on May 20. In a common predicament for companies led by strong-willed founders, he has no obvious successor; his only child, Mark Mateschitz, is still in his mid-20s. Given the potential for a shakeup at the privately held company, it would make sense if internal contenders for the top job were trying to impress by trimming some fat from the balance sheet. That’s especially true when considering that mounting public health concerns threaten to transform sugary drinks, particularly energy drinks, into the next tobacco. Red Bull might not be able to count on $7 billion in annual sales forever.
When looking for cost-cutting areas at Red Bull, pulling back from music has some logic to it, as painful as that is to say. The company inspired envy on Madison Avenue for its success with content marketing, the now-commonplace practice of creating storytelling materials—not ads—that make a brand more attractive to consumers. As embedded as RBMA became in the minds of some musicians and music lovers, the story to tell around music is necessarily more nuanced and less results-oriented than that of Red Bull’s better-known area of content marketing: sports teams and events. Ultimately, it’s hard for executives to know how to measure the return on investment from such great RBMA moments as the inventor of the Moog synth giving a lecture in South Africa, Derrick May guiding a younger techno producer in Belgium, or Brian Eno presenting a visual arts piece in Manhattan.
In 2017, in a previously unpublished interview for a story about how music is funded around the world, Yadastar co-founder Many Ameri told me a couple of ways he hoped RBMA would leave something sustainable behind. One part was physical—stepping in and building studios around the world, something that he felt local creative scenes would be able to use. (These studios still exist, but it is unclear what will happen to them down the line.) The other part was more about building a lasting network among different artists. “When you’re looking at the academy itself, the intention is basically fostering creativity,” he said. “When we leave, there is a new structure that has grown from these people collaborating that would usually not work together. And they continue doing that afterwards.”
Take that in for a second. Ameri, a branding consultant for a global corporation, was thinking aloud about what RBMA artists would do once they were no longer hosted by the company’s sponsorship. And quite often, RBMA made a point of applying that degree of thoughtfulness to music that otherwise would not have broken through to wider audiences, or artists from marginalized communities worldwide. “The music narrative space that they created did not exist before,” says Piotr Orlov, a Pitchfork contributor who was one of the local producers for the 2013 New York City academy. “And if people say it only existed to sell energy drinks, and nothing more came out of that, I would say that is probably very short-sighted.”
Perhaps the greatest lesson from RBMA is that, if a huge corporation is willing to spend the money, it might as well be used to elevate the underground. That doesn’t mean Colonel Sanders at Ultra, or a Lady Gaga gig in a gigantic Doritos vending machine. It means focusing on stories that aren’t often told, artists that aren’t often presented, concepts that are complicated or challenging to implement. “If you just reproduce what the music world out there can do by itself, there is no need for a brand to be involved in culture,” Yadastar’s Ameri told me in 2017. At a time when under-the-radar musicians are more concerned with mere survival than notions of selling out, will another company be willing to give them their wings?
