On April 11th 2016, nine recognized international experts from the audio branding, marketing and music publishing sectors from all over Europe got together at the recording studio of the Audio Communication Group at Technische Universität Berlin to conduct the ABC_DJ Music Branding Expert Workshop 2016.

In a lively discussion a list of semantic terms considered essential for music based branding communication was created and categorised. Chaired by the media and communication scholar Dr. Steffen Lepa, the group thereby laid the foundation to the development of the General Music Branding Inventory (GMBI), a multi-language, scientifically validated basic terminology for communicating brand values and human emotions in the context of music branding.

The topic apparently stroke a chord with the participants who lively discussed the relevance and discrimination of the obtained words also within the breaks and even after the workshop had ended. The next working steps of the ABC_DJ project team from Technische Universität Berlin will be to prepare and conduct an online survey with stakeholders based on the workshop’s results. Furthermore, a pan-European listening experiment will validate the results also from a multi-cultural consumer perspective. Nevertheless, the terminology is already in its present form an important building brick for the overall ABC_DJ goal to provide new tools for European creative agencies in the field of audio branding. It will be published open-access in the near future.