Music Marketing Blog

     As a group of four, we were given the task of making an artist with an entirely new brand. One of the first questions I had when facing this task was, what is a brand. After some research and discussions with my group members we learned that a brand is name, design, product, or service that has unique qualities and can be identified and distinguished from others in its' industry. 

    The music genre we were given was hiphop/funk with the song "Me and Your Mama" by Childish Gambino. Hip Hop/ funk is a genre that I listen to frequently, so I was very glad with our assignment. Childish Gambino is a part of RCA Records as well as Steve Lacy. I was given the task find research about RCA's history and Childish Gambino's marketing strategies, distribution practices, and audience interaction tools and methods. My partner also did research on Steve Lacy. As the second part of our case study, we had to research another record label company that shared the same genre. My group members did research on the company Aftermath Entertainment which was founded by Dr. Dre. We focused our research on two very well known artists, Kendrick Lamar and Anderson Paak. 

    The second part of our project was to make a music marketing campaign. In this task we had to create a brand new artist for the hip hop/ funk part of the music industry and create marketing and distribution methods with unique and innovative qualities. As our target audience is young adults ages ranging from 18-34, unisex, and avid hip hop/ funk listeners, we decided that having a strong social media presence would help us reach more people. We plan on having accounts on various platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube where we can post song teasers, behind the scenes footage, and clips of performances. We also plan to hire famous influencers to use our songs for their posts to help us promote or new artist. Additionally, we plan to take part in countless concerts and music festivals to help our artist make connections and hopefully meet new artists for future collaborations. We have a very active website baby funk website where you will be able to find our brand's mission statement, overview of what it is we do (make music, sell apparel, host music events), as well as our tour dates and tickets. 

    The third part of our project was to make a music video to launch our artist to the music industry. We created a storyboard of 20 slides to describe the love story of two individuals who come together in love, face some relationship troubles, and finally breaking up which leaves our artist Baby Funk in a funk as he is hung up on his ex. This story was inspired by the song used, "Me and Your Mama." My group worked together on creating the story board and then worked after school to film the clips. As I was the group member who is most comfortable using Adobe Premiere, I was given the large task and responsibility of editing the entire video. My strategy for editing was to just do the best I could with the clips provided and play around with video effects, audio effects, and video transitions. I made sure to include many transitions when moving from clip to clip to integrate a certain level of fluidity to our video. I played with the coloring of our clips to add to the 'funk' aspect of our genre. Editing was overall very fun and the final project was something we were all very proud of. 

    All in all, I learned so much from this project. Being able to look at distribution and marketing practices as a creator instead of student opened my mind to a world of possibility. I truly felt like I was working in the music industry world and creating a real brand. I learned how essential it is to plan ahead, creating a campaign, and a plan for distribution and marketing. Being able to practice more on Adobe Premiere will be something that will definitely be beneficial for future projects as well as really expanding my knowledge on the marketing and distribution side of media industries.