Music Marketing Project

Music Marketing Project

February 11, 2020

About a month ago, me and the rest of my Media Studies class were assigned a music marketing project in which we were to create a marketing campaign for a new artist.  Along with the actual marketing campaign, we were required to create a music video for a song that we chose and research facts about our song's genre, such as the typical characteristics of music from that genre and the genre's normal target audience.

Pop Music

Pop is an extremely popular genre among young people, notably among people in their teens to people in their early thirties.  In recent years, pop has found most of its consumption by the masses to be on streaming platforms such as Spotify instead of by older means such as CDs and vinyls.  We found in our case studies that new artists such as Billie Eilish and Cuco got their start releasing songs online using platforms such as SoundCloud, further evidence of how digital marketing and distribution was important to the pop genre.  It is clear that pop music has thrived in the digital age as it has been able to reach wider audiences on a variety of platforms and devices at any time the consumers please.

Creating a Brand

For our song, we chose "When I Get My Hands On You", lyrics by Bob Dylan and vocals by The New Basement Tapes.  Since the song was about love and romance, we decided that we would build a brand for our new artist based around intimacy and love songs.  This led us to create our new love-song pop artist, Luke Ross: America's Next Sweetheart.

Marketing Merchandise

Since this project would be completed in the month of February, a.k.a., the month Valentine's Day is set in, we decided to focus our merchandising on February.  The art for our artists premiere album, "Love Letters", would be a limited edition for purchase in the month of February and would change once the month ends.  The allure of getting something that is a limited production was intended to motivate people to buy the February-exclusive merchandise while they still can.  We also created a page where visitors are able to create their own Valentine's Day cards and send them to whoever they want while the page plays our song in the background. The page would be accessed from links on all of our artist's social media pages, which we created a multitude of due to our genre's target audience being the demographic that uses social media the most.   

What We Learned

This project was a pretty big learning experience, especially considering we had never had to produce a music video or organize a marketing campaign.  The biggest thing we learned about production is that shooting and editing a decent video take a lot of time.  Just getting about a minute and a half of good footage took about two hours of filming, with the rest of the week prior to the project being due being used to go over the footage and edit it all together.  Another important thing we learned is we need to be greater consideration into why we make the choices we do in a marketing campaign.  We, and many other projects, put great focus on using social media and creating websites to market our brands just because we felt it was needed to best reach our target audience.  However, we did not put enough thought into each of the specific choices we made about why we were making them.  One exception to this on our end was our decision to use r/Music on Reddit to get our artist's name out, citing the opportunity to create a loyal fan base and introduce a lot of people to our song on Saturday, which the subreddit reserves for small time artists to release new songs.  This decision had a lot of thought and reasoning behind it, which is something that we should have done with much more of on the other parts of our project.

Keep an eye on this blog to see what I have to talk about next time!