Songtrust
Songtrust is a global music publishing administrator used by songwriters all over the world to collect the royalties that their songs earn.
Order worked with strategist Adam Beal to reframe the brand communications around empowering songwriters at both the personal and global level. The identity system is built to embrace each individual's voice, while uniting the brand structure around the familiar, universal visual language of music.
Collaborators
The music publishing industry is riddled with complexity. From an individual's process of creation to properly registering a song, the path to receiving royalties for your music takes many different turns.
The brand story repositions Songtrust's communications around a songwriters place in their career and community, as well as Songtrust's role with an individual and the industry.
Photography by Ebru Yildiz→
Brand story
This is the most exciting time to be a songwriter. Every year brings new ways to write, record, and distribute music allowing songwriters to connect and communicate better than ever before. Where there was once one path to success, now there are infinite.
The identity of a songwriter must expand to keep pace with this increase in opportunity. Many songwriters think all they need to do is focus on the music and everything will fall into place. Most don’t even know they’re songwriters within the eyes of the music business — they think they just sing, make beats, produce. But change is coming. Songwriters, like the rest of culture, are beginning to realize their agency and there is no going back.
This is a new way of building a songwriting identity in the music world. The songwriter is no longer a single, passive entity, but an active piece of an interconnected system.
With Songtrust, there's an opportunity to invite songwriters to take a more active role in building their career. And with songwriters more engaged in their career, the music industry is shaped for the better.
Songtrust works directly with songwriters and directly with the industry. All their efforts are in
the service of helping songwriters build healthier careers.
Each identity element can work both together or separately, depending on the application.
Two music notes work together not only to create a letterform in the icon, but to reinforce that songwriters are individuals as well as community members.
The National 2 family from Klim Type Foundry→ complements the geometry and structure of the system while adding its own personality.
Throughout the brand, a bright and eclectic palette is used to embrace the diverse culture Songtrust represents.
With the icon built around individual notes, the extended brand language builds on the visual structure of music itself, reinforcing the idea of an individual's role in a community.
Each block in the grid can be filled with photography, type, or color while the overall composition shifting to reflect the content.
A custom set of icons were designed from the primary brand mark to be used throughout the product.
With a brand story now centered around songwriters, messaging can be used to embrace this idea.
Different elements can be combined, repeated, or paired together to embrace different facets of the music publishing world.
The identity is built to reflect and evolve with a complex industry, allowing for Songtrust to grow at the same pace of the community.
