Welcome to Lalu's Corner, a monthly column by music and brand partnership agent Lauren Thackray, exploring commercial music applications and sync placements, and the most pertinent takeaways for independent artists.
In February, Alysa Liu won Olympic gold and then did something no one asked her to do. In the exhibition gala - the free skate, no medal on the line - she skated to "Stateside," the PinkPantheress and Zara Larsson track, in an outfit modelled on PinkPantheress' look from the music video.
The song went to No. 1 on Spotify's Global Daily Chart the next day.
Interesting to think about why it was primed to travel the second someone gave it a reason to.
Adjacency over reach
Zara Larsson has had hits for over a decade, like "Lush Life," and "Ain't My Fault," and a genuine pop CV to boot; not to mention a Grammy nod for Midnight Sun and a full viral moment of her own in 2024 when a TikTok meme sent "Symphony" back up the charts nine years after its release.
She wasn't obscure, and she wasn't waiting to be discovered, but she was back as a nostalgia act (the "decade-old song people were rediscovering"); not as the artist setting the temperature. Then she turns up on a PinkPantheress remix and the register changes entirely: a Coachella appearance, a No. 1, a different kind of attention altogether.
Zara didn't need PinkPantheress' audience, she already had reach of her own, plus a meme that proved she could still go viral without help. What she got instead was adjacency: proximity to an artist coded as taste, placed next to her on a record built to be shared.
PinkPantheress handed Zara her credibility. This is the thing worth sitting with for anyone advising an artist on features: stop asking who has the numbers. Ask who's coded as taste-aligned in the exact way your artist isn't yet. The right feature changes what an artist is allowed to mean.
+Read more: "For PinkPantheress, a Minimal Stage Is Key to Intimate Fan Connection"
Authenticity is the adjacency you can't fake your way into
Which is really the whole game. Zara didn't just co-sign a hot feature — she co-wrote every track on Midnight Sun, working the record with MNEK, aligning herself with the self-made pop star that PinkPantheress and Charli XCX's Brat had already made the default.
The manufactured, untouchable pop star like Britney or Beyoncé — built at arm's length from the audience — wasn't the model she was reaching for.
@britishvogue #PinkPantheress fangirls over #Olympic gold medal-winner #AlysaLiu at the #Burberry AW26 show at LondonFashionWeek.
♬ original sound - British Vogue
That matters here specifically because adjacency runs on trust. PinkPantheress could transfer credibility to Zara because PinkPantheress has credibility to lend — earned by being visibly, audibly the author of her own music. A figure skater could reach for "Stateside" unprompted because the song read as real, not as product.
Authenticity isn't a value statement anymore. It's the currency that makes every other adjacency possible.
Adjacency compounds
Liu didn't just skate to a song — she lent it something back. An Olympic gold medal, an exhibition slot with no scoring on the line, a look built off PinkPantheress' own video: a 20-year-old volunteering her biggest platform to a pop record because the association already made sense to her.
That's the second half of the mechanism. The PinkPantheress feature bought Zara one adjacency, deliberately, with a deal behind it. Liu's skate multiplied it. Once an artist is coded as credible enough, other people start doing the work of standing next to them - unpaid, spending their own reputation on the association.
The first adjacency is never the last one. The payoff is everyone who borrows it after you.
What's the takeaway in all this?
For the artist: Your next feature isn't a numbers trade, it's a credibility transfer - pick the person who allows people to believe in something new about you.
For the manager: The adjacency you can build is the deliberate one - the feature, the co-sign, the right room. Get that right and the free ones, the unbriefed skates, the borrowed looks, start compounding on their own.
For the label or brand backing either: You're not just buying reach for a campaign or a release, you're buying what strangers will be willing to lend it next, for free.
Zara Larsson had the songs, the numbers, even a meme, for years. It took one adjacency, and one moment nobody planned, to change what she meant.
PinkPantheress Tour Dates
Zara Larsson Tour Dates
Lauren Thackray is the Founder of LALU&CO, a music culture agency helping brands build artist partnerships and cultural strategy. Her clients include Unilever, L’Oréal Paris and Heineken amongst others. And via her Substack newsletter, LALU Dispatch, she writes about brands and music.
