Emirates Incorporates Big Time Music To Events, Sponsorship Season

Hot on the heels of its marquee sports sponsorships including the Emirates Airline Dubai Rugby 7s and the Dubai Football Challenge, Emirates Airline is dotting the Winter/Spring events season in Dubai with a medley of music and cultural festivals. This year, the airline is adding RedFest DXB and Choirfest Middle East to its already diverse portfolio of sponsorships.

    In addition, the airline is title sponsor of the Emirates Airline Dubai Jazz Festival – a partnership that began in 2003 and has since grown into a calendar event that attracts big name stars. Since then, the Emirates Airline Dubai Jazz Festival has attracted almost 390,000 spectators. For those with more literary appetites, Emirates sponsors the eponymous Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, which is now in its seventh year. The yearly literary event is expected to attract almost 30,000 visitors this year and will feature over 130 writers and authors.

      From November until April each year, Emirates supports more than 40 events in the UAE alone, ranging the gamut from music and cultural festivals to sports. It begins with the season opener at Meydan ending in the Dubai World Cup, and the annual cricket event, the Emirates Airline T20.

    Boutros Boutros, Divisional Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, Marketing and Brand said, “Emirates is well-known for sponsoring world-class sports clubs and properties, but our sponsorship portfolio features a good mix of arts and cultural events as well. Dubai and the UAE, being our home market, gets the lion’s share of our attention when it comes to sponsored events, as it aligns with our strategy to boost Dubai’s attractiveness as a hub for cultural, arts and world-class sporting events. Sports allow our brand to reach a broad audience across geographies, while music and culture tend to be slightly more niche. Sponsoring cultural events allow us to engage with a different audience, or sometimes, even the same audience but in a different setting.”

    This year, Emirates Skywards members in the Middle East can redeem their miles for concert tickets, as well as VIP hospitality tickets to the Emirates Airline Dubai Jazz Festival and Redfest DXB. Outside of the UAE, the airline sponsors Australian Symphonies comprising of the Melbourne and Sydney Symphony Orchestras. In the United States, Emirates sponsors the San Francisco Symphony.

     Onboard music comprises of a significant chunk of the content offered on Emirates’ industry-leading ice entertainment system. Ice features over 1,000 music and podcast channels in almost 36 languages spanning genres such as Classical, Opera and Jazz and R&B, among others.  It also has channels dedicated to the Emirates Festival of Literature as well an audio book collection. The ice inflight entertainment system also has a dedicated channel to the symphony orchestras that the airline sponsors.