Music marketing research

Heey everyone, and welcome back to another blog about one more fun project that we had in AICE media today!!

For our Music Marketing project, our group was assigned the Country genre in which we had to research and analyze how artists and companies use marketing and distribution strategies to reach audiences within that genre. Each group member had to choose one music production company and two artists that released music within the last five years, create a research chart and then use that research to produce our final media product. During this final media product, we are required to create full marketing campaign for a brand new artist, building the artist’s entire brand from scratch, including a logo, social media strategy, distribution plan and even a music video. Before planning any of this, each member completed a research chart about marketing and distribution in the real music industry.

I chose to research about Universal Music Group MCA (Music Corporation of America) along with 2 major country artists, who are Luke Bryan and Chris Stapleton. Within this research, I included background information about the company as well as other major artists names from MCA. For both of the artists, I included informations such as their brief history and how they started their career, target audience and brand identity, digital marketing and distribution information of how the artist uses these techniques and platforms as a strategy and also how they use non-digital marketing distribution as well. This research shows how country artists mix traditional promotion like radio, vinyl and award shows, with modern digital marketing like social media and streaming platforms. 

After completing our research charts, our group moved into planning the full campaign. We chose the song “Need You Now” from the folder of country songs because the emotional tone of the song matched the brand identity we wanted to build for our new artist. Our artist name consists of a duo of a woman and a man called “Echoes of us”. We then created their personality, background, target audience, aesthetic and also assigned roles within the group for each member. We used the first week to outline our campaign, which helped us plan how the music video would visually connect to the song. Once the storyboard was finished, we scheduled our filming days to record the different scenes, shots and the behind the scenes footage. We also assigned the days of when we would work on our presentation and focus on developing social media and digital promotion strategies to brand our new artist. The planning chart was really helpful since it helped us to develop our ideas and brainstorm for the project.