Your New Music Crush is Sweet as Candy

To celebrate Candy Crush Music Season, an annual in-game tournament, we decided not to make an ad. We made music.

From Kanye, NSYNC, Jay-Z, Charli XCX, and Snoop to Aphex Twin and Childish Gambino, musical artists from a multitude of genres have a long history of sampling video game music (and SFX) to create hits that ‘clock’ the charts.

We leaned on the popularity of game sampling while leveraging the brand’s ubiquitous (and delicious) IP to create original music with the likes of Kimbra, Łaszewo, and TOKiMONSTA. We dropped the tracks alongside ‘candified’ music videos directed by world-renowned director duo WATTS and original album artwork created by Jiayi Li.

We used the game itself as the media channel. The tracks were available exclusively within the Candy Crush Saga app before dropping across Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, and beyond.

Brands using music as a vertical is nothing new. But convincing a brand to hand over its IP and give artists the freedom to create whatever they want is. The result was real music and real music videos, not jingles or ads. That level of creative freedom was entirely novel, and no easy task, but the music and the cultural response spoke for themselves.