BECK BRINGS "LIGHTNING" TO BEATS

Beats By Dre’s latest global video campaign—heavy on footage of superstar athletes and directed by “This Is America’s” Hiro Murai—is set to premiere the video for Beck’s new single “Saw Lightning.” Capitol Music Group SVP Brian Nolan provides the deets on how it got made.

“I was following up with Beats’ Ed Alexander about the campaign with Halsey, and he mentioned they were looking for the right record for an upcoming large campaign,” Nolan says. His first thought was the new Beck track, which he offered to Alexander and his team. “They saw the potential, but they had to see it against picture.” To Nolan, the song “has the magic.”

Beck’s song, produced by Pharrell Williams, was already targeted to be the focus of the pre-release campaign for his next album, Hyperspace. Capitol released “Saw Lightning” today to all digital services.

Hyperspace, which has no release date, will be Beck’s 14th album, following 2017’s Colors, which won two Grammys.

For the last 18 months, Nolan has run seventeenfifty, the unit that secures brand partnerships and music licensing opportunities for CMG’s artists and music. The first home run was the partnership between Halsey and Beats By Dre that drove “Without Me” to 1 billion streams and made it the first Capitol Records release to hit #1 in five years. He was also behind Migos’ campaign with Mountain Dew that featured “Position To Win” and connected Migos with Major League Baseball making them the face and sound of the 2018 postseason.

Nolan’s team, which includes the Capitol brand team chief Nathan Ledesma, Beck’s marketing exec at Capitol, Arjun Pulijal, and seventeenfifty’s Jeremy Volk, did the deal with Beats with a seal of approval from Silva Management.

Nolan’s next projects involve breaking U.K. stars Freya Ridings and Lewis Capaldi via syncs.