You will have seen the announcement earlier this year that pop sensation Lady Gaga has become the creative director for instant camera company Polaroid. The cynical amongst us might view this as a publicity stunt that won’t translate into anything more than a few column inches. After all, now that all pictures are pretty much instant, the Polaroid brand could be accused of desperately trying to find a reason to exist. And for a performer whose most recent music video featured, count them, NINE product placements, one more brand could be put down as just another endorsement deal.

But wait, scratch a little beneath the surface and there’s more substance to the deal than first appears. Polaroid is not quite the has-been it almost became. After being close to closing shop a couple of years ago, Polaroid has found a new lease of life that makes its positioning of instant pictures relevant the digital age, with new designs and new range of products that include mini portable printers. And as for Lady Gaga, or Stefani Germanotta as she used to be called, she is a long-time Polaroid fan and says she sees this as a big opportunity to add her artistic vision to an iconic brand. See what she said on CNBC, the news network: “I want to make very high quality products that speak to the Polaroid consumer in a way that is very lifestyle oriented. It’s all about, for me, the functionality and the feeling.” She speaks intelligently and comes across more like a brand manager than a pop star puppet.

There has been a shift in the relationship between bands and brands over the past few years and the deal between Lady Gaga and Polaroid, while unusual, is by no means unique.  (In 2007, for instance, Puff Daddy was made the brand manager for Diageo’s Ciroc vodka.) The shift has occurred for a number of reasons that together have encouraged brands and bands to want to, well, get into bed with one another. First reason being that music sales have taken a dive and artists and their managers have been forced to look elsewhere for revenue. It used to be, sales of recordings were the number one source of income, now it’s live performances and third party sponsorships. Second reason, marketers have found that as media fragments and consumers have discovered new ways to be distracted (phones, ipads, Facebook, Twitter, games to name just the obvious ones) it’s more difficult to engage them for any length of time or with any depth. Those annoying ads just won’t cut it any more.

So, enter music, stage left. Fans have a deep emotional connection with music, so the logic is that if the brands form partnerships with the artists they can get a bit of it too. But, in Lady Gaga’s case it’s about more than just her music. She is a brand in her own right and she’s taking the artistic vision that shaped that brand and applying it to Polaroid.  Gaga sees herself as not just a singer, but a renaissance woman with creative skills that work across all sorts of lifestyle products.  Even before Polaroid she had launched a line of high quality headphones called Heartbeats. She describes them as “headphone jewelry” and in a press conference announcing their launch, she told reporters she “loved the idea of creating a headphone that sonically made it possible for fans to listen to music the way that producers and artists intended for them to hear it.”

Lady Gaga is very savvy about branding and, while she has a whole team of marketing people from Universal Music Group advising her, she clearly knows what’s she doing. When she first stated to perform music in bars at New York University she was largely ignored by the drunken students there until she stripped down to her underwear – and barely one year later she had crafted an image that made her a superstar. Music industry veteran told Forbes Magazine last December: “She is directing every frame of her music and her life, imagining how clips will appear on YouTube and what people will tweet after she appears on the VMAs.”

The video for her latest single, ‘Telephone’, with Beyonce was an epic that she co-wrote with director Jonas Akerlund. At a time when budgets for music videos have been largely nonexistent, this 9-minute extravaganza took three days to film and a month and a half to edit. There were product placements throughout – the nine mentioned at the beginning of this piece – but only a few of them were in fact paid-for endorsements. Others were included by Gaga just because they added to the story. The brands that did stump up to be featured provided much needed cash for a hefty production budget. Her manager, Troy Carter, told US advertising magazine Advertising Age: “If Michael Jackson was making ‘Thriller,’ he would do this too. These million-dollar music videos have to have partners to be produced.” ‘Bad Romance,’ another Gaga video, has thus far been viewed 180 million times on YouTube, making it the second most viewed of all time (the first being a baby biting his brother’s finger).  We don’t think this is selling out. The fans are in on the joke and get the music they want without having to pay for it. We applaud the fact that the music industry, not too long ago a poster boy for an industry desperately in search of a business model, is fast becoming a hotbed for innovation, and that marketers are seeing value in artists for their branding as well as their musical talents.