Philip Connolly, head of marketing, Sony Music Commercial Group, has told Music Week that catalogue “is part of the cultural fabric of the company”.
Speaking in the wake of a win at the Music Week Awards in the Catalogue Marketing Campaign category for their work on Pink Floyd, Connolly praised the major’s approach.
“I think that for the past number of years [working catalogue campaigns] has been a challenge, but certainly within Sony, we find that catalogue is part of the cultural fabric of the whole company and is really treated as more important than ever,” he said.
Sony acquired the rights to Pink Floyd’s catalogue in 2024 and launched a campaign to mark the 50th anniversary of their 1975 album Wish You Were Here. It topped the albums chart at Christmas last year when, according to Music Week analysis, it opened with 24,476 sales (5,889 CDs, 13,295 vinyl albums, 4,431 Blu-rays, 277 digital downloads and 584 sales-equivalent streams).
We're lucky to be in a position to work their catalogue and be the curators of it – hopefully we staged a post-modern campaign worthy of Pink Floyd
Philip Connolly, Sony Music Commercial Group
That was the band’s second No.1 album of 2025, coming after the remastered and expanded Pink Floyd At Pompeii: MCMLXXII hit No.1 for the first time in May.
The Wish You Were Here campaign included activations with Noel Fielding and Simon Armitage, Blood Records collaborations and a London pop-up.
The album now has 914,629 sales according to the OCC, with Music Week’s charts analyst Alan Jones writing that “It has undoubtedly sold well in excess of a million copies, though no exact data is available”.
“We're thrilled to win this award,” Connolly said. “I think it's a great achievement, recognition of a campaign that we're all so passionate about, and put everything into, and that we hope that Pink Floyd would have been proud of.”
Connolly also reflected with pride on Pink Floyd’s chart performance.
“We had two No.1s in a year, which is befitting of a band of Pink Floyd’s status,” he said. “I think it speaks volumes about their catalogue and really just shows how culturally, sonically, musically relevant the band continue to be. We're lucky to be in a position to work that catalogue and be the curators of it, and hopefully staged a post-modern campaign worthy of Pink Floyd.”
Connolly also spoke positively about the realities of working catalogue campaigns in the modern business.
“We're so aligned with different parts of the business that for the first time in some time, it really doesn't feel like a challenge,” he said. “It feels there's something that's aligned with bigger company values and is really getting its flowers and the recognition that those of us who’ve worked in catalogue for years know it deserves.”
As for advice on how to succeed with breathing new life into older works, the exec had the following words of advice.
“I find that we work best when it's a partnership, whether that's with artists and teams themselves, estates, management or representatives,” he explained. “I think we're best when we act as partners to the catalogues that we look after, and at Sony we don't do anything without artists' permission. We want buy-in from the artist, we want to work collaboratively with them and have them believe in everything that we do as much as we do. That sort of close alignment is important and we work best when we have common goals and creative endeavours that we all believe in and fully back.”
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