Linkin Park transform music partnerships

Linkin Park must be one of the most forward thinking and partnership friendly bands in contemporary music. Hardly a week goes past without them announcing a new brand partnership.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHsYOtQIlT4

This week they have announced one with Hasbro to create a Linkin Park Transformer. The super-limited edition Linkin Park Soundwave is based on the original 1984 toy but much more modern.  There will only be 2,000 units available for those who collect. It will be super glam gold colour and include Lazerbeak, Buzzsaw and Ravage apparently!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysSxxIqKNN0

This is a logical brand partnership given the association between Michael Bay, the Director of the three modern Transformers films and Linkin Park. Linkin Park have contributed the three main soundtrack songs for each of the three films, “What I’ve Done”, “New Divide” and “Iridescent”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYiIBCN9ec

The other ultra cool brand partnership that Linkin Park have created recently has been with Dell and Open Labs.  The band and software developer have created a solution for PC users and aspiring musicians to live their dreams called MUSIC OS. This makes it easy for anyone to create, perform and share the music they make.

Used by industry professionals MUSIC OS combines with Dell to give users  tools to design sounds, produce professional quality songs and share them instantly on the web and prepare powerful sets of concert-ready songs.

Dell have launched a limited Linkin Park lap top. This special Linkin Park Edition features exclusive, custom-made Linkin Park Sounds, the full version of Open Labs’ Music OS software, and high performance Dell XPS 17 laptops and 2320 All in One devices. LP Underground members (otherwise known as their fan club) will be offered additional exclusive sounds.

These two clever and on brand partnerships follow the Linkin Park Lotus F1 App partnership which followed their headline playing concert at the Singapore Grand Prize in 2011.

All these partnerships are sophisticated ways to help market the new album "Living Things" around the world in an increasingly competitive entertainment market. They seem to work as "Living Things" went to number in the US, UK and Asia and was the world's number one album. Cost effective targeted partnership marketing clearly works!