Music Marketing the First

Greetings from the thick of it!

The music marketing project is in full swing, and I feel like I know ten times more about a pretty ubiquitous medium than I did two weeks ago. We started with a media context chart, with RCA and Columbia records as the company case studies; that’s proven to be essential background, particularly with their (clients? products?) Doja Cat and Harry Styles. Both of these artists exemplify extremely savvy use of social media, and much of our fictional band’s marketing draws on their teams’ tactics (especially Doja leveraging TikTok challenges for exposure, and Harry Styles creating buzz through unique, uber-marketable merch).

Right now, we’re compiling all of our ideas surrounding the image, audience, and persona of our band into a full-fledged marketing pitch. It all feels very hypothetical (i.e. maybe a band that’s mostly marketed to young adults would also have a presence on Facebook—sorry, Meta—but who knows? Is that site dead for young kids, or only young American kids? How do we market to an international audience—should we even try? And who’s to say older people wouldn’t also enjoy quirky bedroom pop?), but maybe that’s the whole point. So much of the music industry feels ancient and far-away, but a) it’s constantly evolving and parts of it are extremely new, and b) all industries are just made out of people, so each of these elements are hypothetical until those people make it happen. In some Columbia Records board room, real humans carefully crafted Harry Styles’ shift from a boy band expat to a suave, mod pop-rockstar. There was probably a timeline of that brand evolution written out on a whiteboard.

I’m really enjoying crafting our band’s audience interaction strategy. For example, we’re set to start filming the music video at my house tonight, and on my way to school I had the idea to create a sort of “book club” for the fandom, based around the books featured as set decoration in the MV. It’ll help us lean in to the precedented “intimate, dedicated fandom” pattern (think, Beliebers, Swifties, Little Monsters), and give the Puffles more media to obsess over, share, and buy. It feels a little callous to frame it like that, but marketing seems to be as much of an economic endeavor as an artistic one—probably moreso.

I’m nervous about how much we still have to do, but it’s a relief that the next steps are clear: finish shooting and editing the music video, finish getting the text from our (many) shared documents onto the presentation slides, and finish tuning up the social media pages. In other words, finish.

Attached are screenshots of our planning docs, running list of MV ideas in the Notes App, etc.