Coca-Cola Is Using Its Musical Legacy to Pay It Forward

When you think of Coca-Cola, you undoubtedly think of its iconic red label, Spencerian script logo, and contour bottle. Simultaneously, you might also think of the music that has soundtracked the brand’s advertising over the years. Whether it’s ‘Holidays are Coming’ to mark the start of the festive season as the Coca-Cola truck rolls into town, the 1971 chart hit ‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke’ that brought a global chorus together in the lauded ‘Hilltop’ campaign, or another song entirely, the brand sits on a historic legacy of creating music that interacts with culture.

To continue building on this legacy in 2025 and beyond is no small feat. It's one undertaken by Joshua Burke, global head of music and culture marketing at The Coca-Cola Company. Formally trained as a jazz saxophonist, Josh first worked for Coca-Cola in 2011, before becoming global head of music sourcing in 2015. Keen to build on his musical foundations and gain an understanding of the inner workings of the music industry, he joined Universal Music Group in London as vice president, strategic marketing and global partnerships.

It was here that he solidified his belief that brands and music companies aren’t all that different, and that there are countless ways that the two can work together to enhance and empower artists and brand messaging. Moving back to The Coca-Cola company in 2022 as global head of music and culture marketing, Josh leads global strategy, partnerships and execution of music and culture marketing initiatives, overseeing the company's portfolio of brands and deepening Coca-Cola’s relationship with music culture around the world.

Speaking with Music and Strategy’s co-founder and president, James Alvich, and partner and EP, Gabe McDonough, Josh discusses his career journey, the changing relationship between music and brands, supporting artists through initiatives like Coke Studio, and why the brand is shifting from traditional advertising towards experiences.

^{Above: Music and Strategy's James Alvich and Gabe McDonough}

MAS> First up, tell us - what’s the Joshua Burke story? How did you end up at Coca-Cola, and what’s your music-brand journey been like?

Josh> My journey is an interesting one that feels like everything was well organised and thought through, but actually, it’s a lot of ‘professional meandering’ that led me to this point.

I've been a musician since I was a child. I went to school in Chicago to study jazz performance for the saxophone, which is where I got my only professional degree. I was a professional jazz saxophone player for a long time in Chicago, but was also recording for a lot of different artists across different genres. I started playing music for ads, which led me to working at a company that supported emerging artists around the time when the digital explosion occurred. So, whilst the amount of content was abundant, music licensing was expensive.

I then worked for a company called MusicDealers that identified emerging talent and positioned their music for advertising. And through that, I started working with Coca-Cola, broadening my horizons, as I moved to Mexico City, where I was working with an international market for the first time to help create music strategy for The Coca-Cola Company in Latin America. Then I joined Coca-Cola formally, and from 2015 to 2017, was the global head of music sourcing.

After a while, I took a hiatus. I felt that I spent all my time inside of a big brand talking about music and strategy, and I had a little bit of imposter syndrome because I’d never actually worked in the music industry. I was talking to record labels, managers, and talent agents all the time, but I didn't have any context for how they did their job, what moved the needle for them, or what the music industry as a whole prioritised. So, I left and I joined Universal Music Group (UMG) in London for four years.

UMG moved me to LA, and then I was given the opportunity to come back to Coca-Cola in my current role. Now, everything feels like it was all planned and makes sense, but in actuality, for my entire career I've just been super passionate about music, and the intersection of brands and music. I've always felt that there has been a tremendous opportunity to evolve how music and brands work together in order to move culture forward in a meaningful way. In turn, that has a real anchor in supporting emerging talents and growing music communities through the power of music and brands.

All in all, I feel very fortunate in my role. Not only am I able to work with some of the biggest artists and music companies in the world, but also, we have a very purposeful and genuine ambition to pay it forward to the future of music and its communities, which is amazing.

MAS> Music has always played a part in Coca-Cola’s advertising and legacy. Where does the brand currently sit, in 2025, in relation to its musical journey, and how has it evolved?

Josh> One of the biggest reasons why I'm working at The Coca-Cola Company is because of the extraordinary legacy that Coca-Cola has with music.

Coca-Cola has been part of cultural fabric not just in the US, but all across the world. As a result, we have permission, and even a responsibility, that when we work with passion points like music, we need to contribute to that fabric, and we also need to be very respectful of what happened before us in our own legacy as a company.

The Coca-Cola Company played a very important part in the evolution of music and brands, especially because we achieved a very important milestone before any other company did. ‘Buy the World a Coke’, marked the first time in history where a song that a brand created for a campaign actually became a chart-topping song in culture.

Typically it's the opposite – we spend a lot of money and energy licensing music to be in our campaigns, but this was the reverse of that. I think that really kickstarted the idea that has lived in the hearts and minds of a lot of my predecessors at Coke, and in the greater marketing community of our brands: music can become a much more powerful tool to connect with people outside of just licensing a song for an ad campaign. While that can be very effective, music has the ability to connect much deeper and on a much more emotional level.

^{Above, Coca-Cola - Hilltop [I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)]}

MAS> How have you seen this come into play in your own experiences?

Josh> When I first started working in this industry, the role of music for a brand was three things. It was either; let's licence this song for this ad campaign - so sync licensing. Let's hire this artist to endorse the product, or it was, let's sponsor a live event or music festival and logo slap our brand on a stage or have some pouring rights. And at the same time, traditional advertising was the focus of a lot of big brands. At The Coca-Cola company, we've made the switch, or the intention to switch, from traditional advertising into experiences. Which is very important.

MAS> And Josh, do you think that the reasoning behind that can be tied to music, as it’s a social connector, and a memorable one at that?

Josh> The opportunity for a brand like Coca Cola to position itself in music as a marketing mechanic is so much deeper and more meaningful than just licensing a song to an ad campaign, or having an artist hold a can and talk about how delicious the beverage is. And, in an ecosystem where we're moving from focusing on traditional advertising into experiences, that opens up a whole new world of possibilities for how we can work with music to connect with the next generation of our consumers. It gives us an opportunity to add value back into the music ecosystem that we've been benefiting from for several decades. So, as a result, we have evolved the way we work with music beyond marketing communication/mechanics to actively collaborating with the music industry, in order to build more meaningful connections with our audiences, which is our consumer.

To give an example of this, there's a property we have called Coke Studio, which has existed since 2007. It’s a platform that actually creates music with artists, bringing them together from different cultures, genres, generations and languages to generate new music and put that out into the world as a record label would, or in traditional fashion. So, a lot of the lot of the work my team and I are involved in right now is moving beyond traditional advertising, and building an infrastructure that will allow for us to create and release music while working with artists in varying ways, from creating artist-driven storytelling programmes and content,to supporting tours and live events in more interesting ways than just sponsoring them.

In the last three years we've released almost 100 songs. Which isn't much if you’re Universal Music Group, but for a brand like Coca-Cola to say that, it’s pretty great. We've partnered with artists and have created with them, and to have released that volume of music is pretty phenomenal as a brand.

MAS> And how do you approach working with artists, when you’ve worked with such an array of smaller talent to global names?

Josh> We have a top-down and bottom-up approach when we work with music. We know that large artists will provide us not only with the scale and the reach, but also the ability to support this talent in a different way than we were previously, where it was just about the paycheck. We're actually trying to leverage the machinery of Coca-Cola to help drive the needle for all of the artists as a marketing vehicle to help amplify their voice and their creativity.

On the other hand, when it comes to emerging artists, we have been paying it forward for a very long time. Around the world, we are supporting new voices and music through programmes like Coke Studio. We can elevate these artists across borders to a global audience, and provide support and opportunities for these artists to have a broader infrastructure to help them better connect with their fans.

MAS> I would love to know – and it might be different for bigger artists and smaller artists – but what does that support look like? Obviously traditional advertising offers eyeballs on work, but is there other stuff that you’re doing, and what do these bigger artists that perhaps don’t prioritise the paycheck, like about it?

Josh> There's a lot of layers to that answer. I would say one of the biggest shifts in the way we work with music has been the evolution to a fan-first strategy.

When you build a music strategy around fandom, and you unpack how music fandom works in the music sense, it allows you to create much more meaningful and impactful ways of working and building our programmes. Another example of this comes from Coke Studio. In 2024, rather than have an advertising or creative agency put together scripts for talent and have them manufacture a story for the artist, we collaborated with all of these artists on everything from their creative vision for the story to crafting live experiences that were driven by their own vision.

We also approached our social strategy in a much different way too. Instead of predetermining how and when posts would happen and on what channels, we realised that no one knows their fans better than the artists that we're partnering with. So, we took the artist’s lead on the types of content that we would create, when it was posted, and the plan for rolling out content.

Ultimately, we mirrored a lot of what we were doing with modern music industry practice. If Universal Music Group or a label was to put out a project or a record, or Live Nation or AEG was to roll out a tour, we would work with partners to unpack how they would roll these out. That way, we could mirror that, versus trying to have a music industry process fit within the context of the brand’s very ‘cookie cutter’ advertising skills.

MAS> In what ways have your experiences from both the music industry and the brand worlds informed your perspective that music and brands can work closely together?

Josh> There was a big epiphany for me, and once I went to the music industry after being at a brand, it really started solidifying. When you start looking at the organisations and the industries as, ‘what are the similarities and commonalities between the two?’, a lot of opportunities start to be unlocked in terms of how you can work and grow value.

For example, I work at the corporate centre of a marketing team inside Coca-Cola, and we operate a portfolio of different brands underneath the corporate centre: Coca-Cola, Sprite, Vitaminwater, Smartwater, Topo Chico. Universal Music Group also has labels. We have Coca-Cola, they have Interscope. We have Sprite, they have Republic. We have bottlers and customers that distribute our product, and they have Spotify and YouTube. So, when you start looking at the ecosystem of our brand and the ecosystem of the music industry, there are a lot of different ways that we can link to add much greater value than we previously thought possible.

When we align and we understand that our businesses are not so dissimilar, it enables us to align our objectives in a much more meaningful way, in order to better impact our business goals while contributing to the greater good of music and culture.

MAS> What innovations and trends do you foresee continuing down from the intersection of music and brand marketing, and how is Coca Cola embracing them?

Josh> There are multiple points to this. One of the evolutions we are taking on as a brand is that we are collaborating with an ecosystem of music partners that we have brought on board through what we refer to as our ‘global music ecosystem’. This network enables us to operate much more authentically and much more effectively within music. So, the first trend that we see is the integration of brand marketing efforts within the music industry, more broadly.

The second one is the realisation that music has become more democratised and globalised, and that music trends are leaning into import and export from a lot of different markets. Because of that, we are going to be focused on a more international approach when it comes to the types of artists and programmes that we elevate. Right now, country music is having a massive moment outside of the US, and Afrobeat and African music has started having a big moment in the Western world. We anticipate the same happening with India, and it has happened already with K-Pop, whilst Latin American music and trends have grown too. There's a celebration of international sounds and the mixing of international music cultures, which is something that we are elevating.

The third one is the embrace of ‘fandom first’. What types of experiences can we elevate and create for fans? Something that I'll say on the record is, “The Coca-Cola company acknowledges that its legacy in music has been powerful, and we're dedicated to investing in the future of how we work with music, or in music.”

Soon, as a result of a lot of hard work, we're going to be announcing something really exciting that will really bring everything I just mentioned together under one roof, so to speak. We’re going to be launching a completely new way of working with music that supports emerging artists across the world, creates new experiences for fans, but also amplifies major artists in a much more meaningful way than we've done in the past.