Cole Bennett is a creator, director and the founder of Lyrical Lemonade, a brand known for producing music videos, the Summer Smash festival and the Lunch Break Freestyle social series. Last week the creator company Whalar Group announced it was launching a studio production arm called Lighthouse Studios that would partner with Lyrical Lemonade to build out a video network, Lyrical Lemonade TV.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Dylan Wells: What new content are you most excited about that this partnership is enabling?
Cole Bennett: It's the idea of expanding beyond music which is most exciting for us, being able to have different series that touch on travel, food – different crevices of culture. That's something that we've always had our hand in.
When it comes to building out content, it's free rein to really step into all of our interests in a way that expands on it all more than we've been able to in the past, taking that same integrity that we've applied to music-related content, and then slowly but surely expanding on it. But it's always rooted in music.
Even guests and the talent that we're gonna have on shows, we'll start with a lot of musical guests, but we have actors lined up, politicians, athletes, and just familiar people in this space. I mean, because we built such cache across all mediums, it's fun to kind of put those things to use. We've always [approached cameos before like], ‘Oh yeah, we'll put Mike Tyson in a music video,’ right, and always finding ways to blend it all. Now we can base a lot of the content around some of those more cameo-driven pieces.
DW: When you're thinking about doing a travel show or something that's new for you, how are you thinking about maintaining the Lyrical brand? What else should we expect to see in the content?
CB: The travel show we're really excited about. It's called “No Comfort,” and it's primarily based around musicians, and we're taking them to foreign countries or places that they've never been before. We have a travel guide who's been a friend of ours for years, who's incredibly knowledgeable, very worldly, eloquent. And then we have on the ground hosts, in whatever country, that are going to help familiarize us even further.
With each trip, we're going to dice that into four episodes. With travel, it's like: How do we soak up as much culture as possible? I think Gen Z wants to learn more than we've ever seen before, and we just want to make really exciting content, but we want to be very informative at the same time. And the travel show is a good example of us checking off all the boxes.
I think the idea of this show, you can't not get someone truly in their element. I mean, they're seeing things for the first time. It's all on camera, and it spans over roughly an hour worth of footage spliced into four episodes. So I think that that's going to be the most raw, uncut look at people's favorite artists, and [the artists] get to have a hand in where they want to travel to. So it's a collaborative process. The whole thing it's like we're going on a trip together.
DW: Thinking about the Lighthouse and the Summer Smash, are there plans for a real life counterpart to Lyrical Lemonade TV? How are you planning to get your community together?
CB: Obviously a lot of people made the MTV comparisons, and they were talking about the spring break parties and the MTV live events.
That, to me, was so exciting, because a big avenue within Lyrical Lemonade, since the beginning, has been shows. You know, we threw our first show in 2013, [with] 90 people at a rehearsal room. It was a free show. And we do our festival every year, and we want to activate the Lemonade TV there in the future, and do live panels and live shows, and just activate it. So I think that's something we're super excited about, is just the experiential IRL aspect of it all, and that's kind of TBD on what it looks like exactly, we want to focus on bringing it to stream in the way we're hoping to first.
DW: Are you working with AI at all in your workflow?
CB: Not saying we're anti AI by any means. And I think we use AI as a tool, right? It's helped us mock together ideas of sets that we want to build out. And it's definitely helped behind the scenes, in being, you know, a vessel within it. Six months ago it's a different conversation. Six months ago I really saw, saw the vision for AI, and how it can be worked into what we build. And that could change in a few months, but right now, I'm all for the human experience.
This Q+A is part of Verified, a newsletter that is published by WP Creator, a new business outside The Washington Post’s newsroom that is focused on the creator economy and content partnerships with independent creators. Learn more about WP Creator.
