Background

The Music Liberates Music program is a long-running initiative that aims to help aspiring artists - especially those with limited access to resources or support, break through the many barriers they face in the music industry. It aims to cement Bacardi as a brand that is interlinked with music by supporting music from a grass-roots level as embodied in its “DO WHAT MOVES YOU” brand ethos.

The target audience for the Music Liberates Music campaign is music lovers, and the objective is to build brand awareness and affinity in the music space.

Idea

A demo tape is how up-an-coming artists are discovered by record labels. But with limited resources many artists don’t have access to the high quality production values that are needed to get it noticed.

BACARDÍ’s Music Liberates Music program was created to find ways to help aspiring artists. For our fifth iteration of the project, we set out to democratize access to one of the world’s most sought-after producers Boi-1da.

Introducing Boi-1da.i: a generative A.I version of the grammy-award winning producer Boi-1da. A tool trained on signature style using his unreleased catalog of beats to enable any aspiring artists to upscale their demos and get it noticed—giving them the best chance of breaking into the industry.

Strategy

BACARDÍ is a brand that targets music fans and supports musicians - helping the next generation to come up and continue making the music that moves all of us.

To create this tool we had extensive talks with Boi-1da about his approach to producing a track. We analyzed his catalog and broke down every pattern, sound, effect and categorized them. We then worked with Tuney, one of the few music AI companies certified as Fairly Trained. We utilized their API to train a custom AI model on a large catalog of Boi-1da’s unreleased tracks and beats to create a web app capable of taking any demo and producing it just like 1da would himself. And with over 3.2 billion possible permutations, it offered the artists plenty of freedom to tweak and iterate.

Showing that when done thoughtfully, AI can be used to augment human creativity rather than compete with it.

Execution

Participating artists used a web-based generative music tool powered by AI technology from Tuney. Tuney’s API combined user uploaded music, sounds from Boi-1da and original sounds produced by Tuney’s in-house team to generate results. Artists uploaded demo tracks into the system, their vocals were extracted using Audioshake (an AI music stem separation model), and Tuney’s AI assembled an original, custom instrumental track that match the artist’s vocal performance. Tuney uses a proprietary first-party model and algorithm, along with ethically sourced owned music data to power its functionality.

The user could then tweak instrumentation, mood, tempo, vocal processing etc. be re-generating parts or the whole track. When they’re satisfied the tool allows them to download the track as a multilayer stem file for final mastering in a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) of their choice.

The tool is based on Tuney’s proprietary API, and is one of the few certified fairly trained AI models out there, meaning that all data used to train it has the correct licensing and has been in development since 2020.

Designing the web interface for the tool to utilize Tuney’s API, integrating it with Audioshake to split the tracks into stems for each instrument and training a custom model with Boi-1da’s music took about 2 months of active development time. From start to finish the project took about 8 months.

The consumers experienced the work by listening to The Concept A.I.Bum or through reading the extensive coverage across news articles in major publications such as Rolling Stone Magazine, Wonderland, and Complex. They saw discussions regarding the use of A.I on the album on Lost In Vegas’s Youtube channel, as well as through social media posts.

Outcome

The campaign’s main performance metric was driving plays and awareness of participating artists, which was a clear success. The Concept A.I.BUM was streamed over 1 million times in the two months since its release, the artists saw a 27% increase in their Spotify plays, a 58% growth in social mentions, and an estimated combined reach of over 3 billion.

Bacardi as a brand saw a +39pt Positive Sentiment Lift globally across social media, and during the campaign our Share of Mentions rose to 52%, nearly 1.8x of the period leading up to the campaign, which made Bacardi the #1 SOM holder in global key markets.

Importantly, the campaign sparked positive conversation amongst journalists, artists, and the music industry around AI’s capabilities: a way for more artists to get access to top production talent, and for top producers to work with more aspiring musicians than ever.