Overview
Play It Again Music Group is a full-service music company founded by award-winning hit songwriter Dallas Davidson. The company encompasses PIA Publishing, PIA Entertainment, and Double Down Music, alongside Davidson’s personal publishing interests and catalog.
PIA Music Group also maintains strategic partnerships, including Double Down Music’s joint venture with Triple Play Music, founded by country music superstar Jason Aldean and longtime partners Kurt Allison and Tully Kennedy.
With two in-house publishing companies working in tandem with the PIA Entertainment division, Play It Again Music Group supports world-class artists and songwriters by providing high-level creative resources within a collaborative, artist-first environment.
The Challenge
As Play It Again Music Group expanded, its structure and visual identity no longer reflected the scale or ambition of the organization.
Multiple entities existed without a clearly defined hierarchy, shared narrative, or unified visual system. The brand needed to consolidate under a cohesive umbrella, establish credibility alongside global music companies, and support press announcements with polished, launch-ready assets—without losing its instinct-driven creative foundation.
Strategy & Collaboration
This work was developed in close collaboration with Lindsay Maxwell, aligning leadership vision, business priorities, and creative philosophy into a scalable brand framework.
The central strategic decision was consolidation through continuity.
Play It Again Music Group became the masterbrand, intentionally shortened to PIA—a concise, iconic name designed to build long-term brand equity. Rather than centering the brand around any single individual, the system positioned PIA as the enduring creative engine behind the work, allowing the organization to scale while honoring its legacy.
The Lettermark
The custom lettermark is subtly inspired by perpetual movement, infinite soundwaves, and the feeling evoked when you want to keep doing something, whether its listening, writing, dancing, or recording. A single continuous line forms each letter, symbolic of the baseline constant in most melodies and the idea of repeated sound. A perpetual motion is present, but still grounded in form. The negative space and positive space work together to create the words. (like all the people and instruments and systems that align to create that song that makes you wanna just play it again and again). Subtle curvature within the positive and negative space has a new and modern approach to the traditional sanserif typeface, while the angular corners ground the identity in confindent, professionalism and strength.
Role: Brand Strategy, Identity Design, Art Direction
Collaboration: Lindsay Maxwell
Scope: Masterbrand Strategy, Brand Architecture, Visual Identity
Year: 2022
Double Down Music
Double Down Music was the newest entity within the PIA ecosystem and required both a name and identity from scratch.
The name originated from the founders’ real-life story of first connecting at a blackjack table—a metaphor that captured the label’s ethos: trust instinct, commit fully, and push harder when it matters.
The identity reflects a clear creative philosophy:
Intuition over trend-chasing
Black-and-white decision making
Confidence rooted in experience and work ethic
Visual Identity System
The visual system was designed to communicate confidence, clarity, and permanence. Double Down Music is a subsidiary of PIAMG, so it needed to fit within the more corporate masterbrand.
Design principles included:
Minimal, iconic forms
High-contrast, authoritative typography
Modular logo architecture across all entities
Press-ready execution from day one
The goal was not trend-led design, but a timeless system capable of supporting long-term growth.
