86Tales becomes EightSix

86Tales announces its transformation into EightSix. The change marks a fundamental evolution from a music production house into a strategic brand partner that helps organisations make clearer, more defensible decisions around music and sound by combining creativity, technology and experience. 

Music and sound have long been recognised as powerful brand assets. Brands value music. Agencies understand its emotional impact. Yet in everyday practice, music decisions are still largely driven by intuition, taste and trends. This often results in subjective choices that are difficult to explain, defend or scale across brands, markets and time. EightSix was created to address this structural gap.

“I didn’t set out to build a company,” says co-founder Gordian Gleiß. “I had one skill and I needed to take responsibility for an idea no one else was willing to lead. Over time, I learned how our industry works and more importantly, where it breaks. Most problems don’t start with creativity. They start with communication and understanding.”

In recent years, the industry has increasingly turned to the language of culture to describe its role. This shift reflects an awareness that music matters deeply in people’s lives. At the same time, culture is not a positioning statement. It is shaped by lived experience, friction, community and time, and it cannot be adopted or repackaged on demand. For EightSix, lasting relevance comes from depth rather than labels. The central challenge is not access to culture, but a deeper understanding of music itself. Its emotional architecture, its structure, and its ability to influence perception, memory and behaviour at scale. When music is understood at this level, it becomes more than expression. It becomes a strategic system that can be used responsibly and creatively to build meaning over time. Emotion remains essential, but it is supported by clarity and shared language. This perspective allows brands and agencies to move beyond symbolic use of music and toward work that resonates emotionally while contributing to tangible outcomes such as brand differentiation and commercial impact.

EightSix approaches music not as decoration, but as a strategic system. Emotion remains essential, but it is supported by clarity and shared language. The objective is to create work that resonates creatively while contributing to tangible outcomes such as brand differentiation and commercial impact.

Over the past two years, EightSix has rebuilt its operating model from the ground up. The company now works at the intersection of three deliberately balanced elements: creative excellence, technological intelligence and long-term industry experience.

This model is already being applied in close collaboration with brands including OTTO, Siemens Home Appliances, DEICHMANN and Ferrero. EightSix works directly with brand teams while supporting lead agencies, helping to reduce subjectivity, create alignment and enable decisions that are both bold and defensible.

At the centre of this evolution is the EightSix Brand Studio Tool, an enterprise solution developed in collaboration with Cyanite, a Berlin-based music metadata company, and SoundOut, a global leader in music testing.

The platform enables brands to analyse musical attributes, test emotional impact and evaluate music and sound choices across touch points with greater confidence. The intention is not to replace creativity with data, but to give creative decisions a stronger foundation.