THE METEOR Music Awards may have handed out their last gong in 2010, but the mobile phone network hasn’t fallen out of love with the music industry just yet.

Meteor has signed on as the new sponsor of Today FM’s Paul McLoone show – replacing Heineken – and intends to use the deal to leverage its association with its sponsorship of the Choice Music Awards (aka the Mercury Prize to Meteor’s Brits) and the Camden Crawl.

“In 2011, we felt the Meteor Music Awards had run out of steam,” says Meadhbh Quinn, Meteor’s head of brand and advertising.

What the Choice Music Awards, Dublin’s Camden Crawl festival and the Paul McLoone show have in common is that “they are more about emerging talent”, she says.

“Any research we’ve done shows that music is the most effective sponsorship we can do, in terms of our target market of 15- to 35-year-olds,” Quinn adds.

McLoone’s show, which moved from 7pm-9pm to a 9pm-12am slot earlier this year, will feature 12 branded show trailers per week and 12 branded audio stings per show, as well as a weekly feature called the Meteor Album/Song of the Week and weekly live performances dubbed the Meteor Sessions.

The music is not about to stop for Meteor any time soon, as its title sponsorship deal of the Choice Music Awards runs for another two years.