SoStereo's New CEO Lindsey Camerota Is Reviving Music's Human Heartbeat

Nothing moves us like music. There’s a reason why so many of the most iconic ads are remembered for their use of music – be it the righteous drum solo of Phil Collins in Cadbury Gorilla or the soothing melody of José González underpinning a timeless Sony ad. It’s because music can speak to us on a primal level, unlocking nostalgia, comfort, and a litany of emotions leveraged by the most successful brands to forge connections with audiences. 

Lindsey Camerota, SoStereo’s recently-appointed CEO, understands music’s power instinctively. That’s partly because of the unique role it’s played in transforming her own career, taking a political science major into the world of marketing via an enduring passion for DJing. “I stumbled onto a college DJ program because I wanted to add an extra dimension to my studies, and I fell in love with it”, she recalls. “The most important thing when you’re a DJ is being able to read the room and adapt – it’s not about forcing your way through the exact playlist you showed up with. And marketing is all about having that kind of agility, too – the best idea is often the one that arrives somewhere along the journey”. 

And yet, despite the potential of music to make or break a piece of creative work, it’s frequently the final item on the agenda and, as such, can be overlooked. “Unless music is the driving force behind the creative – like you’ve licensed a Rolling Stones track, for example – then it’s the final point of a long process where the budget might have run low or people are just eager to make final decisions and move on”, says Lindsey. “But, of course, that has a knock-on impact for effectiveness which can seriously hold a campaign back”. 

That insight formed the basis for ‘What About The Music?’ – a podcast series from SoStereo which invited creatives to reflect on their musical influences and the importance of audio in their roles. “Interestingly, we find that so many creatives share our frustrations when music gets neglected”, notes Lindsey. “So a big part of what we want to do going forward – and my role as CEO – is to promote a deeper understanding of music’s effectiveness and why it should be a cornerstone of any creative idea”. 

On which note, SoStereo is leaning into data to share insights about musical trends. Just recently, the team dived into the Paris Olympics to discover how brands were leveraging audio to deliver their messages. That research gets added into an unrivalled bank of musical knowledge and connections to real artists, built up over a decade by the SoStereo team. As Lindsey knows from her own experience, that makes the perfect foundation for audio effectiveness. 

“Coming from the marketing world, it has always been a laborious and exhausting process getting the right music for advertising. I've often felt as a marketer that I was settling for my choice in music due to time or budget constraints”, she says. “But by using real artists SoStereo is injecting life, beauty, and creativity into a space that can feel overly uninspired and transactional”. 

Instead of transactional, SoStereo’s model is designed to promote growth on all sides. Working with real artists ensures that there’s a two-way street, wherein independent artists can build their careers through strategic collaborations with brands, and those same brands enjoy the advantages of working with genuine music rather than stock filler. 

That point about real music is key, and it’s a core part of SoStereo’s offering. A global network of over fifteen thousand real artists provides means by which the team can link a brand with authentic, genuine music that comes from a true creative mind. But SoStereo is a lot more than a stale, dispassionate library. 

“It’s not just about picking out a song and moving onto the next thing, what we do goes a lot deeper than that”, she says. “We’re fundamentally a service company. You can come to us with an open-ended brief and we’ll work with you to find the right artist and song, whilst also sharing our insights into why a certain type of music is going to resonate with your audience”. 

The people at SoStereo make that possible. “The team is so wonderfully passionate and talented; I’m proud to be a part of it”, she says. 

Illustrating her point, Lindsey references a recent client interaction. “We had a brand in the luggage category who came to us asking for a classical track to support their ad,” she says. “But they also mentioned that their audience was predominantly female-leaning in urban areas. With that information, we were able to use our database and insights to identify two artists who were trending amongst that demographic and we decided to work with them. The result was an ad that was much more resonant for the people the brand wanted to connect with”. 

There’s something in that story that touches on a quality which is too often overlooked in the tech-driven, algorithmic noise of the modern industry. Yes, SoStereo’s insights are based on data (lots of it), but they’re also curated by experts – there’s a human element in making the logical leap from ‘insight’ to action, or from knowing who your audience is to knowing what they’ll be listening to in six months’ time. As Lindsey goes on to explain, that’s a reflex she honed during her time at Spotify. 

“When I worked there, there were teams of people who curated playlists for every genre. Yes, there were algorithms, but you needed that human element to keep things fresh and interesting for listeners”, she says.

Dipping into her experience in political science, Lindsey likens it to the difference between ‘bridging’ and ‘bonding’ ideas. A ‘bonding’ topic would be something that further unites and activates people who already agree with one another – if one group of people loves cats, for example, you can be sure that cat-related content will provide a shareable source of enjoyment. On the other hand, a ‘bridging’ idea is a concept which lies just outside one group’s comfort zone – far enough to be new, but not so distant as to be totally alien.

“It’s the difference between your ‘for you’ feed on social media and something like TV news”, says Lindsey. “Social media is resolutely and algorithmically personalised to you, and you are constantly fed content that is deemed as appealing to you as an individual. Whereas with TV news, editors have more of an interest in keeping content relatively diverse so as to appeal to a wider audience base”. 

In recent months, there’s been a slew of negative articles about Spotify. Users have reported their decision to walk away from the platform in exposing pieces for The New Yorker, Vox, and elsewhere. A common complaint is that music discovery on Spotify has moved from surprise to irritation, with the same selection of algorithmically-approved songs popping up no matter the genre or mood. 

“It shows how important the human element really is”, notes Lindsey. “Even if you have the most perfectly optimised campaign and message, it won’t land unless you think deeply about the people who are seeing it – their likes, dislikes, and ambitions”. 

Like the fledgling DJ she once was, Lindsey is still reading the room. Only this time on a much bigger scale – uniting brands and audiences through music they want to listen to, rather than the noise they skip past to find it. 

In the digital era, it can often feel like the cultural world we inhabit is missing something. Not in its sheer amount of content, but in how we find and connect with it. It’s the predictable logic of a machine, without the heartbeat of a human. 

In that context, there’s a need for someone to read the room. A curator to make sense of it all and present us with something new that surprises us - with growth, rather than endless feedback. That’s the mission which Lindsey and SoStereo are on.