The Gap brand

The Gap - who make sweaters, apparently - have underwritten a project featuring the likes of the Raveonettes, Marie Digby and Swizz Beatz, which sees the bands getting given a colour, and asked to create some music around it.

What's interesting, besides the results, is the interaction between sponsor and project, as told to Advertising Age's Songs For Soap:

The idea was pitched to Gap as a response to their brief: a nontraditional project that complemented their spring "Color Redefined" campaign and didn't require any media buy. We looked at what Gap had done historically with music and devised a complementary web model. It was also important to look at the target audience and create content and a distribution method that fit their lifestyle. If you live for music like I do and like our target does, you understand that the process of discovery is very important. That's the rationale behind putting all the budget into creating great music and compelling video rather than media buys or placement.

The idea is that Gap want to be seen as a patron rather than a company buying some music for its marketing campaign - and, up to a point, it has been somewhat hands off.

There are some nagging doubts, though - the subject the bands have been given to work around are directly lifted from the advertising theme the chain is using this season - which isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself, but does constitute a fairly major injection of Gap influence into the whole programme. And the gap between The Gap and the finished product gets smaller still:

The artists were given almost complete creative control by Gap and Rehab; there were a few mandatory constraints -- no political endorsements, no obscenity, etc., but other than that the artists were allowed to create whatever they wanted to. And in the end the rights to the tracks revert back to the artists; they can use those tracks however they want. Gap has no right or license to use the works in a commercial way.

The lack of ownership from Gap is admirable - seriously, for the company to say that it wouldn't even expect to use the finished products in a TV spot as of right is quite refreshing. But the suggestion that you've got "almost" complete creative control - only nothing political or offensive - is a bit hollow. If you say "record want you want, but no sex or politics" (and whatever is covered by "etcetera"), you're not actually setting artists free, you're setting a High School essay competition.

Still, it's a much more interesting project than deodorant companies paying to get Pete Wentz to spray his armpits during a pop video, and the resultant stuff - available at Sound Of Color (a website with almost no mention of The Gap at all, besides a small credit) - is much, much better to have in the world than to not.