Music Marketing Blog Post #2

 

                        Rock Music Marketing

        The process of creating an entirely new music brand can be a tedious process. But what is very interesting about it is the freedom of creating someone from the ground up, developing strategies that will ensure your brand is successful, and presenting it others who may consider it a great idea that can be accomplished based on the steps used. 

Research: 

        As stated in my last blog, one of the main things that we did for our research is looking at different rock artist who are just starting to develop their brand or are already worldwide famous. Some of the examples that we investigated was the band Imagine Dragons, Bon Jovi, Kaleo, and John Harvie. Imagine Dragons, Bon Jovi, and Kaleo are some of the best-known rock bands of their time and have really great marketing strategies that made them very popular. While John Harvie is a new artist who has just started creating his brand a couple of months ago, creating a comparison between brands of today's time and a comparison between the brands from years ago. 

        One of the main things that every artist had in common is that everyone had a website that included hyperlinks to their streaming platforms, tour tickets, merch, or any type of events/ information on the artist themselves resulting in a base marketing tool for fans to use and learn about the band and as a way for new fans to learn more about them when they are first searched up on the internet. In addition, another similarity on the promotional aspect of the artist is that they all own an Instagram account that also promotes their upcoming music, tours, meet and greets, and other events within the artist. This is a great marketing tool since they are making their efforts to connect with their target audience which is between teens and young adults. 

Planning of Brand: 

        Another thing that was mentioned on our last blog was the planning process. The planning of our brand includes a lot of different ideas that can make our artist become more recognized and successful. One of the main things we have relied on to create a great marketing campaign is the research of our case studies and the lessons we have learned in class. For example, one of our marketing materials for our artist is to have a presence on social media along with creating technological and cross-media convergences such as merch and Ad's with companies, this is a helpful tool that engages the audience with the artist in more ways than one. By developing merch, and social media accounts fans are able to learn more about the artist and the message they are trying to convey. In addition, the process of creating a music video outline and a storyboard helped us determine the type of elements in film that we wanted to include with the purpose of involving more meaning within the music video itself. 

        One of the many challenges that we came across during the building of the brand is the type of representation and message we wanted to present while also being clear and cohesive. Identifying the main important factors that need to be used to develop a successful marketing campaign were a little difficult to identify because there are so many things that want to be added to make our artist more successful but there is also a lot of events that need to occur first before stepping into bigger marketing decisions. For example, if an artist starts to become recognized by playing at bars or local restaurants, the next step can't be having interviews with big magazine, radio, or television channels because they need to be a part of a record deal first to understand the process of growing and becoming a world-famous musician. 

Marketing Brand:

        For the gradualism of our artist (Violet Hart), we chose a basic 3 step progress. We are first starting with local restaurants as normal gigs with a flyer attached to let the audience know who is performing and where you can find more information about them. The second step is signing a contract with a record deal (Going for Elektra Records who is associated with Kaleo) and building more of a social media presence for example, instead of just having an Instagram and TikTok we would add a website on the internet. The third step includes releasing of new songs, doing interviews, meet and greets, and the release of her first music video which will follow up with merchandise of her new music.

        We chose to do these steps in order to build our artist audience and for her to also be able to connect with them. One of the many things we thought would be a good way to interact with them was with the use of a TikTok account. In modern society, many individuals in the ages of 14-25 (Violet's target audience) use that platform as their main source of social media, so to really match her audience with her brand that inclusion ensures that she would grow a fan base. In addition, the production part of our music video went as according to what we had in our plan. The elements we chose to use in order to better portray her story developed deeper meaning to her message and we believe it is a great marketing tool that will make the audience more interested on who Violet Hart is.

Presentation: 

        The process of building our presentation was sort of difficult for our group. While we knew how to we wanted to portray our artist and developed the plan completely, we wanted to make sure our own audience understood what was trying to be accomplished through our brand along with the ideas we created to ensure that our artist was successful. Once figured we had a good structure, we practiced our slides to better understand our material fully so we would not depend on flashcards or the slides to explain our brand and the process of building it. While I do believe the slides could have been split more evenly, I believe we did a good job at keeping a pattern within the colors of our artist and presented it in a way that our audience enjoyed our idea.

Reflection: 

        During the making of this project, there was a lot of things that I learned. One of the main things I learned that is not easy building someone from the ground up and making sure they become as successful as possible. For example, when brainstorming ideas of who our artist will be, we had a lot of ideas that revolve around the fact of her as a person and her background. In addition, I learned that it takes a lot of planning and effort to make something professional and well for other people to like it, and while there may be people who might not like or fully understand the concept of a person it's also good to know that many do. One of the many aspects that will help with the Cambridge Portfolio is the use of planning and thinking deep of the decisions being made. For example, having an outline for brainstorming or creating a plan is very helpful to process your ideas and how they can be developed fully. Also, time management is a great tool to have when creating a media project. Having a schedule to help you out on knowing how much time you have to plan, write, film, and edit a video can elevate it as a whole. I believe this was a great project that makes you understand the process of ay brand, no matter if its music, film, or print, it teaches you how to develop something that is good.