Music Marketing Project

In our music marketing project, my group members and I worked to create a marketing campaign for our Brooklyn-based indie-rock band, Super Cyber-Punk Space Cowboy Band.

MEDIA AND DISTRIBUTION TRENDS

We mainly focused our research on Grizzly Bear and Cage The Elephant since they embody the genre that our band falls under (indie-rock).

The first thing that we saw among our case studies is the overall image and presentation of indie-rock bands. It is quite clear that the branding emulates a nostalgic feeling, and also enables the use of bold coloring (typically yellows or reds) to suggest individuality and creativity.

TV on the Radio's album cover, homage to Radiohead's album 'Ok Computer'

Cage The Elephant's album, high contrast of photo looks as if it was taken on a polaroid 

Grizzly Bear's most recent album 'Painted Ruins' utilizes reds and oranges

For Cage The Elephant, their band started through performing in local clubs and grunge scenes, developing a stronger sense of their image. We noticed that bands tend to be marketed as a whole, and it is not very common for an individual in a band member to be recognized above the other (although some bands do tend to draw attention onto their lead singer).

In terms of social media usage and demographics, Twitter and Instagram are the apps that are most commonly used. This makes sense since the age-range of users on Twitter and Instagram make up for a large representative of the indie-rock target audience. 75% of instagram users are 18-24 year olds, and 80% of Twitter users are millennials. Cage the Elephant has around 9,345 tweets that averages out to about two to three tweets per day ever since they created their twitter.

Main page of Cage The Elephant's twitter

Twitter is a good app to increase audience interactivity and for promotion. Since any user (regardless of whether you are following them) can retweet or comment on a post, it allows for a connection to be built amongst audience and band members. Instagram also has these features, but it is more commonly used to maintain the image of a band.  

A brief view of Grizzly Bear's instagram feed,  a snippet of their latest album can be seen within each post (even the composition of other posts mimic the shape of the album design)

The distribution for indie-rock bands focus on the use of streaming services such as Spotify. 29% of Spotify users are aged 25-34 and 26% are 18-24, which is again the age-range that makes up the majority of indie-rock's audience. Youtube is also a very commonly used platform to upload music videos, so often so that Youtube has became the norm where artists (from all genres) will post their videos online. Online merch stores are available through a band's website, can and people buy album CDs or Vinyl records (keeping in tone with the artistic style). However, merch sales do not appear to be a huge priority for indie-bands.

Almost all indie-rock bands have a website, but that is usually the only bit of internet presence (unless you count youtube). One key feature about the website within indie-rock bands is how most of the site will be primarily focused on a newly released song or album put out.

Snapshot of Grizzly Bear's homepage

DEVELOPING BRAND

Our main goal was to make sure that our branding matched the styles of our case studies, yet having its own twist to it. That is why we decided for our band to include some sort of space/psychedelic theme. We also included the use of logos (the use of our alien face, eyes, etc.) as a simple yet effective method of establishing some sort of symbol or 'identifier' of SCPSCB band within the public eye.

Symbol of SCPSCB

Starting off small by performing in small venues is the most logical route to start collecting a small audience and to build our resume. Live performances and venues can help establish us locally, and where we perform also gives insight to audiences on what genre of music we play. If possible, promotion through local papers can help generate buzz around Brooklyn of who we are, and using posters to advertise upcoming venues is vital.

MARKETING PRODUCTS

For our website, we made sure that it was centralized around new our music video and new released song. We also made a simple online merch store which is displayed on our site. In general, our website was going to be the only kind of presence SCPSCB would have on the internet (minus youtube of course). We made sure that our Twitter and Instagram accounts also had a link to our website in our bio for our target audience or for any professionals who want to get more information on who SCPSCB is.

WEBSITE: https://kathy0pericas0g.wixsite.com/scpscb

A music video for our newly released song could help with our marketing for a couple of reasons. Of course, it also helps to promote our new song. It is a tool to help establish our branding/image. More importantly, also helps expand our target audience to people who do not live within our local community. We found some statistics below showing the value a music video can have for our single:

• January 2020, 93% of most watched Youtube videos are music videos
• 73% of teens say music videos are best content to show artist’s creation (according to Vevo)
• Also, 67% of teens more likely to share music videos in comparison to other media (also Vevo)

To not make a music video would be a huge disservice to SCPSCB and to our target audience.

If you would like to see the video, it's available on our website (link above).

We were challenged to come up with a creative way to promote our band besides using our website and music video. Because the main goal for an upcoming band is to get established amongst their community, we decided that the using a QR code sticker and posting in various shops could be a cool tool to promote our website. Using media convergence in our marketing means there are more ways for our target audience to be informed about our band. According to Scanova.io, QR codes are predominantly used amongst people ages 24-34 (so it could be a tool to reach our older target audience as well).

Design we came up with for QR sticker, features our band logo

WHAT I'VE LEARNED

If I'm being honest, I thought that this project would not be very stressful and it would be a pretty easy assignment (was I wrong haha). It ended being very challenging, and it did push me out of my comfort zone to try new things. Filming a music video is so much harder than I thought it was, and after this project I've developed a very deep appreciation for filming music videos. I watched different ideas come together to create a final result that was so much cooler than I could've ever imagined :).

Even though I was pushed out of my comfort zone, there were moments where I was playing it really safe (such as the music video idea or the presentation of the band) and I think that showed in our overall presentation. I also realized that after presenting, some of the work we made was not from the heart. It was all about making a flashy band that people would like, not really about making a project that my group members and I liked, which may have been the better way to approach this project. I know now that the next time I film a video or put together a project it should be coming from a desire to put together something really cool, not just for a grade.

However, I'm not disappointed about the final result of our project(I'm pretty proud of it actually). While it wasn't perfect, it did teach me a lot, plus I think our video was pretty cool. I'm glad that I made mistakes in this project because it's helping me see what I need to work on, and how I can develop my skills to be even better. Overall, I had a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward for the next opportunity to film and make something my group members and I really love.