Music Marketing Project FINALE

 The first part to the music marketing project was to 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. 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. 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:

We then began to film our music video. We went over to one of the group member’s house and started filming the various shots that we decided upon during the brainstorming/storyboarding sessions we had before. I acted as the director of the video while my other group members were acting in it as the characters. The hardest part of this part of the project was getting the perfect shot that we had envisioned while brainstorming. It was difficult trying to produce our vision, but we were able to make it work. We then went to South West Ranches, a town near our school, where we filmed everything that we wanted to be outside. This did not take long and we were able to finish it before it got too dark to film.

The next thing I had to do was actually edit the music video together. This process was tedious, but eventually I was able to put all the videos together. I had a hard time syncing up the lip syncing of the singer with the actual song in the background and I had to go back and edit each individual shot so the lips would match up correctly. This was especially annoying as I had to continuously input new videos that we had recorded on different days as it would mess up my entire editing process and the syncing up that I had already done. Each time I would have to basically start over and sync up the lyrics once again. Previously, our teacher had explained to us that a fix to this difficult problem would be to film shots where the artist’s mouth was mostly covered by extraneous things. I tried to incorporate this, like for example with the shots that were extremely dark and it was hard to see the singer’s mouth. That was I had some leeway when matching the lyrics to the mouth. 

Here is a link to the completed music video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TQPlve40J4&feature=youtu.be

During class times we worked on our PowerPoint. In the beginning we were stuck on what we actually wanted to write on each slide and how we wanted to communicate to our audience the various marketing and distribution patterns and ideas we had come up with. We divided up the presentation to each group member and began working on our various slides. I was assigned to the explanation of the music video slide and the distribution slide. The music video slide allowed me to explain why our video would be a good promotional video, especially for this upcoming artist that we had created. I explained how various aspects of the music video aligned with her target audience and how the storytelling aspect of the video aligned with the genre of the song. 

I was also tasked to help out with the marketing aspect of the project. I created a website (which was a pain to make and took a LOT of time) that acted as a hub for all of our artist’s creation, and I think it came out pretty well. I struggled a lot with figuring out how to use the website and how to add everything that I wanted to include while making it look aesthetically pleasing as well. Here’s a screen recording of the website:

Along with the website, I also created a promotional teaser trailer to our artist’s album. This was also a struggle to make, but it came out really well and I fell as if it really adds to the marketing of her album. This video will appear on her instagram, which was created by another group member. We then finalized all the marketing products and every idea we would incorporate into our presentation through discussion in class. Here is the video that I created:

Once each group member completed their slide for the presentation we began creating script for our actual recording of our slideshow. We each wrote our own parts and included information that we deemed necessary for our artist. We were then able to record each of our parts and edit them all together into one huge presentation that included every aspect we wanted to discuss. 

In this project I learned how to manage my time wisely. It was a struggle figuring out the timing of this project because there were so many components and I didn’t know how I would manage it all. The structure that our teacher gave us provided an outline in which to start, but beyond that it was still difficult to manage time well, especially in finishing the PowerPoint. I also learned about different ways artist’s market and distribute their music based on their audience and how they want to be portrayed and viewed by their audience. Even in a similar genre, many artists have a different brand identity because of the vibe that they want to put out to their audience. Dolly Parton and Florida Georgie Line, for example, are both a part of the country music genre, yet their music could not be any more different. This is because of their audience and how they present themselves. I learned that knowing your audience is the most important part of a musicians success. Additionally, I fell as if this project will be a huge help once we begin our Cambridge portfolio. Our final project will consist of a huge amount of work and managing time to finish everything in a timely fashion will be the hardest part. This project allowed us to understand the important of this and practice it on a lower stakes project. This was a great way to ready us for our Cambridge portfolio project.