Music Marketing Project: Researching and Planning

 

Music Marketing Project 

Part 1

Marketing means the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising. It is the most important part of any sort of media-centered project and allows you to advertise and sell your product. A good marketing campaign can almost guarantee you profit and success. It is extremely important that you know the medium in which you are marketing, which means you must know the best marketing strategies for your desired project that will reach your target audience.

In this project, my group was to create a new musical artist and build their brand from the bottom up. This meant we were assigned a genre, in which ours was rap/hip-hop, and a song. We then created a music video for the song and developed our artist according to our genre. Most importantly, we had to create a marketing campaign for the artist which fit the assigned genre and successfully promote the artist into becoming famous, which was our biggest challenge. 

~The song~

The song we got assigned is called Dangerous by the rapper Busta Rhymes, released in 1997. The first challenge we faced was the fact that the singer of this song is African American, and the song contains African American slang that is considered a slur for people outside that community. We had to make a decision whether we wanted to bleep out the words in the song or leave them but not film our singer lip-synching those words. At last, we decided to remove those words from the original track in the editing process.                                                                                                                                        Busta Rhymes- Dangerous (1997)       

~The Character~

After researching the song as well as its original music video, we came up with the idea of creating a character for the artist. A fake persona that would have comedic characteristics, catchphrases, strong online presence, and he would embrace the '90s culture. The character's story is that his personality, clothing style, and lifestyle got stuck in the '90s and he has a strong passion for it. His goal is to bring back the culture of that time and the artistic music style especially rap since it was a best-selling genre in the 1990s. We decided his persona should be comedic, as the target audience for his music is millennials and older gen z, they have a stronger sense of humor and value comedy over the quality of a product (research shows they prefer to be easily entertained than consume quality content). 

Meet our artist: The Vanquisher.

~Online Presence~

Researching rappers and hip-hop artists nowadays showed that they heavily prioritize online marketing and advertising through social media. We created various accounts (Twitter, Tiktok, YouTube, Instagram) where our artist will directly interact with his fanbase, create a following, connect with other artists building relationships where they can have a collaboration in the future, and advertise all their content. We discovered that rappers like to release teasers or demo versions of songs on their social media to attract the public and see how successful the song would be if they fully produced and released it, many times resulting in the fans pleading with the artist to release the song as soon as possible. 

We also plan to create a website for our artist where we will post all merchandise, tickets for q&a sessions as well as meet-and-greet and concert/shows. In addition, our artist will be known for hosting secret pop-up shows where he will release the concert information in a few hours/days before the show, and especially at the start, he will sometimes not share the information at all. Moreover, all his music will be distributed on online platforms such as Spotify, iTunes, Apple Music, and SoundCloud, but he will also sell CDs of his songs and albums on his website alongside his merchandise.

~Music Video~

The last step for the researching/planning part of this project is planning and mapping out our music video. We looked at many different rap music videos, especially from the '90s, and choose the best types of shots and editing styles for the song. We are doing a promo-storytelling piece, which means we will have parts of a story happening at the same time our main artist will be singing the song, promoting himself. Since the music is moderately fast-paced, we will match that with our editing style, and we have created a storyboard as well as a list of shot ideas for the music video. As you can see in the picture, rap videos from that time used to have a variety of different shots, but some significant ones are the close up of the mouth rapping, the low angle of the rapper in a "cool" position over the camera demonstrating power, and the crossing of arms. Additionally, we will implement short snippets of the music video in all of The Vanquisher's social media to promote it. Our biggest challenge when making the video will be matching up the lyrics with the singing shots, which is why we recorded the whole song over multiple different angles shots and compositions and then we can pick which shot would look smoother for the lip-synching. 

Here is a visual of what our marketing planning looks like currently, and if we succeed then be ready to have The Vanquisher as your new favorite artist!