We live in the era of branded partnership and sponsored content. With Google and Facebook reaping the lion’s share of online ads, media companies have scrambled to partner with major corporations to buoy their bottom lines. It’s a reality that can be often grotesque, as brands and media entities often maintain starkly clashing ideas about editorial integrity, taste, and the reader experience. Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, you wind up watching Lady Gaga in a 60-foot Doritos vending machine at SXSW.

It’s unclear how this development will play out over the course of the next 20 years, but it’s already obvious that few brands have engendered as much goodwill as Red Bull has over the previous two decades. Founded in 1998, the Red Bull Music Academy functions as a graduate school for some of the most gifted underground musicians breathing. Dedicated to the esoteric, overlooked, and criminally unsung, the RBMA website has underwritten some of the best long-form music journalism of its time. Red Bull Radio consistently churns out quality programming featuring shows hosted by the likes of Dam-Funk, Earl Sweatshirt, and the artists from eccentric Atlanta rap crew, Awful Records (full disclosure: I have written for the RBMA website and once hosted a show on Red Bull Radio).

One of the principal tentpoles of Red Bull’s foray into the music world has been its live music programming and festivals. Rather than partner with media publications to create content, Red Bull has bypassed the middle man and collaborated directly with musicians to help them realize their most chimerical creative visions. Last year, during its Red Bull Music Festival they helped Solange turn New York’s Guggenheim museum into a living and breathing installation for her celebrated 2016 album, A Seat At the Table. Rolling Stone hailed it as a “masterful show..that dominated space…[and] tears down walls.” Last fall, Forbes raved about how dazzling St. Vincent’s performance was at Red Bull’s Festival in Los Angeles.

If its erstwhile competitors like Monster Energy Drink are partnering with the likes of Post Malone for crass, short-term, co-branded tours, Red Bull has thoughtfully exhibited a long-term vision—prioritizing taste, forward-thinking art, and quality. It’s an attitude that has served them well, allowing the company to completely revolutionize its image among fans of underground music and the artists themselves. Most recently, it completed its sixth consecutive month-long festival in New York, in which it effectively took over large swaths of the city’s concert calendar for a protracted stretch. Most shows were sold out, including dark gonzo Swedish industrial pop from Fever Ray, a tribute to the original art-rap genius, Rammellzee, and a brilliant concert installation of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine.

Admist the chaos of the festival, Forbes caught up with Adam Shore, Red Bull Music’s head of live programming for North America, during a rare interlude in the near-constant spate of performances. A highly respected figure within the New York music scene (with stints as a promoter, manager, and working at record stores and record labels), Shore discussed the evolution of Red Bull’s live music strategy and how it became one of the most respected brands working in the music world.

Jeff Weiss: How long does it take to plan a festival of this size?

Adam Shore: Just about every show that we do takes longer than a year to put together from ideation to being on stage. Every show takes on different forms before it finally happens. We start really narrowing down all the ideas on the table six months ahead of time; by four months before, we know the program, and two months before, we’re ready to announce.

Weiss: What’s the gestation like?

Shore: A lot of the shows that are more conceptual, a lot of shows that we do are about sound or label or club night or a time in music history — those ideas are generated by us and we find the right artist to work with to put on the concept of the show. Sometimes artists are coming to us with really ambitious ideas; it happens with singular artists more and more.

In 2015, we did this really ambitious show with FKA twigs, Congregata. When we started the festival, we didn’t do any single artist shows, every show was a concept, it was really important for us to do that. If we were going to join this kind of live music ecosystem, that it would only make sense for us to do things that wouldn’t normally happen anyway. We don’t want to compete with all the clubs and promoters that do all that great work…

Weiss: And the music festival racket…

Shore: Right, we can’t play in that game. All the promoters and venues and club nights in NYC, I love them, I go to them, they helped me become who I am. We partner with them, and it was important that if we did something, it had to be something that couldn’t possibly happen without us. It started with these conceptual shows, these commissions, the Twigs show became this other direction—because although we hadn’t done it before, she came to us with this ambitious idea and we helped her realize that. Then the next year Anohni asked us, and then Solange asked us to do something that we did at the Guggenheim last year, and then St. Vincent asked us to do something that we did at an LA festival.

This year, it’s Oneohtrix Point Never where an artist came to the table with a super ambitious idea, and they didn’t really have other partners to take this to. They can’t afford to develop these and build these kinds of shows themselves. You can’t do what Solange did at the Guggenheim at Coachella, that’s a site-specific work. We’ve been in this really amazing position where artists are coming to us with their most ambitious ideas, that’s been great.

Weiss: How would you describe the evolution of musicians’ willingness to work with brands in the last decade?

Shore: I’ve done this festival for Red Bull for the last six years, and there has not been one artist that we’ve approached that wasn’t interested in being a part of it. I think there’s a reputation out there that we do good projects and treat artists with respect and give artists resources that they normally wouldn’t have, and that spreads.

Most brands that work with music want to work with the biggest artists in the world or the coolest artists of the moment. So it leaves us, 99.9% of all the music that’s ever been made. We don’t chase after the biggest stars, we’d rather work with a wide spread of musicians in different genres.

Weiss: How does the festival work alongside the other components of Red Bull?

Shore: It’s always been our mission that we want people to come to our events and have a great experience but also to learn something. There’s a lot of thought that goes into how we’re presenting the music and why we’re presenting the music and we hope people are making those connections. We’re also lucky to have all those other channels. The events are really only one leg of the stool. There’s Red Bull Radio, which has really incredible programming and also creates a lot of radio shows around the stories we’re telling on stage. And same thing with editorial and moving images, there’s a lot of entry points in for people.

Weiss: Do you work really closely with them?

Shore: Absolutely. A lot of the people who work on these projects come from editorial, I’m actually one of the rare people who don’t, it’s that sort of storytelling approach that we try to bring to these events. We all together decide, what are the stories people should know more about? How can we use our platform to shine a light on people doing amazing things, and that can be from the past, the present or the future. And luckily, it expands.

We’ve been doing a New York festival for six years, and we’re going to do a second edition of the LA festival. Chicago had the thirty days concept, but this year we’re now pivoting into Red Bull Music Festival, so we’ll be doing a month-long festival in Chicago in November. And these are three of sixteen festivals Red Bull does around the world; they’re all in this same framework. Everything is a story-driven event, it’s a concept or a commission or a premiere. We try and do things in non-traditional venues, really try to create a holistic vision for these live shows.

Weiss: What is the value to a brand to think more long-term rather than trying to get the quick hit of an artist who is momentarily hot?

Shore: Our guiding principle is we only want to work with artists who are moving culture forward. And I think that, not to take anything away from pop music, that is the present, it’s not moving things forward all the time. Quite honestly, the money that it would cost to do a G-Eazy show, I’d rather spend on fifteen other artists that are just as worthy.

Weiss: What do you think Red Bull has gained from this?

Shore: I hope that with the work we’ve done, there’s more of an association between Red Bull and music. When people see Red Bull music events, I hope they know there’s a level of quality and care and thought that goes into these events. That it’s a sign of quality. What I hope, though, is that when people do come to our events, they are cognizant of the fact that it’s part of a festival, and even if every night is another genre or features wildly different programming, they can trust if they enjoyed this show they were at, they should give another show a shot.

There seem to be fewer and fewer gatekeepers now in music. Places that you know you can trust. And if we’re lucky enough to be one of those, I hope that people can see that if they like that thing, we have other things they could like, whether it’s editorial, documentary film, radio, that they can dive deeper.

Weiss: Mountain Dew had a label and a Complex-run website. Live Nation had a Vice vertical. All have since pulled out.…It’s rare that a brand places a long-term investment on music.

Shore: I really wish brands would make longer commitments to their music programs, because musicians really still need the resources.

Weiss: Especially the underground ones.

Shore: They need the platforms, they need the channels, the networks, they need to reach new audiences, and the brands can be a real help with that. The thing that longevity gets you is that, at this point, we’ve had 1,200 participants that have come through the Red Bull Music Academy program, 800 musicians on the couch. We’ve worked with thousands of musicians and the way that musicians know that they can trust us is that they talk to other musicians. The work that we did previously does the work for us in the future, it makes everything easier and helps it grow. If you’re committed to something, it’s easier to grow than if you shift…

Weiss: What do you hope for the future for the New York festival and programming nationwide?

Shore: I hope that some of the concepts we create here start traveling nationally and internationally. We do so much work on the development side and some of them are just beautiful one-offs, and it’s on us and the artists to find ways to bring these to other cities and other audiences and let the works evolve rather than just have a one-off moment. And also to work with a lot more younger artists and help them, I think artists sometimes are trapped into being recording artists or touring artists. They make records, they make videos, they do press, they go on tour, and then they make another record.

We’ve been most successful when we’ve been able to take an artist out of that cycle. We know you do that, but what else do you want to do? Do you want to collaborate with a choreographer, a fashion designer, an art director, a film director? Do you just want to meet people and generate some other ideas? We’ve been able to connect other artists and be this resource to help show them all the different ways that they are an artist, and I think that if we continue to work with young artists and give them these opportunities, that’s only going to grow that idea more.

Originally posted on FORBES.COM