Music Marketing Project

The first part to the music marketing project was to actually research how other companies and musicians advertise their music to consumers. My group and I began with researching production companies, specifically in the country genre because that’s what we were assigned. We found two production companies: Big Machine Label Group and Mercury Records Nashville. Under these companies we picked two artists from each. From Big Machine we chose Dolly Parton and Florida Georgia Line and under Mercury Records we chose Chris Stapleton and Luke Grimes.

I had to research the band Florida Georgia Line and I began by finding out the history behind the group and how it formed. I found their website (https://floridageorgialine.com) and looked into how Big Machine developed a marketing campaign for them. I researched about the different marketing techniques they used such as making a brand for themselves by making personal relations with their fans and have a fun and lively atmosphere at their concerts. Their success was outlined by their love of risks and changing the sphere of country music and taking a different tone them other country singers. They also have many partnerships and brands that they work with such as Fireball whiskey and even their own cruise line, both named after two of their songs. Through this branding, they were able to create a name for themselves, one that is recognizable to all. This research allowed me to understand how marketing in the music industry works and allowed me to use these techniques in our marketing campaign. 

After we all finished researching our respective groups/artists, we moved on to planning our actual project. The first thing we needed to do was finalize which song we would do for our music video . We were given three options, and after careful consideration we chose “Need You Now” by Lady Antebellum. We listened to the song fully and started to brainstorm what we wanted to do for our music video. We had to decide between a promo, storytelling or artistic music video, and after looking at the lyrics, we decided to do a storytelling video. We then had to discuss what type of story we should tell. The song is about heartbreak, so we decided to tell the story of a girl and a boy who had recently broken up and the both of them longing for each other. The boy would visit the girls house, without going in, while the girl tried to forget about him. Then while the boy began to walk away from the house, his phone would ring, showing that the girl is calling him and wants him back, ending the video on a cliff hanger. After figuring out the content of the music video we began to storyboard it. Here is the storyboard for our music video:

 

We then began the process of actually marketing our artist and brainstorming how we would do that. We discussed and brainstormed our marketing plan. We drew up a brainstorming sheet where we came up with ideas to push our artist into the mainstream. We took ideas from our research and incorporated them into our own marketing campaign such as partnering with a whiskey brand just as Florida Georgia Line did. We discussed our distribution plan and how we would start with releasing a single and then following it up with a release of  a full album. Then we wanted to artist to go on tour and incorporated that into our plan. The most difficult part of the process was figuring out the artists signature move/brand identity. WE eventually came up with the idea of the artist having her own lipstick brand, and her brand identity incorporate that into her music. Lipstick would be her signature look, which we got the idea from Dolly Parton’s signature look of her big hair. Here is a picture of our brainstorming process:

The next steps of this project are to film and edit our music video. This will be time consuming, but the end product will be worth the time and effort we put into it. We then must create our PowerPoint to actually present our marketing campaign. We started working on it, but there is still a ways to go before we are ready to present it.