Thursday, February 1, 2024

Music Marketing Blog Post #2

Research

After being given the genre pop and choosing the song Electric Feel by MGMT because of the creative freedom it gave, my group began their research. We were to research 4 case studies from two different record labels associated with the pop genre. Each member of the group did one artist. Within those two labels, we chose Charlie Puth and Ed Sheeran under Atlantic Records, and Harry Styles and Rosalia under Columbia Records. In hindsight, it might've been better to choose one popular record label with various artists and another small company with few artists, providing a wider range of information for our case studies. Besides the case studies, we also researched the history of the two Record labels such as who they are owned by and when it was founded. We were also to provide information about other artists that are signed to these record labels, which highlighted the range of artists signed to these companies from Bruce Springsteen to Lil Nas X.

Brainstorming

Once we finished researching our genre, we began brainstorming ideas for our music video:

         As you can see we had several different ideas on how to approach our music video. One thing we failed to think about was how the music video reflected our overall marketing campaign. Throughout the whole brainstorming process we were fixated on what type of music video to do, what story, what to wear, and who to have in our music video, instead of focusing on our artist's campaign and how the music video would be as a reflection of the artist. We approached it like the music video was the first priority and the campaign came second. Putting that aside, we decided to do a promotional/ storytelling music video about a girl and a boy meeting at a party but with a twist. The girl is going to have electricity edited on her so that she passes it on to the boy and that is the "electric feel" the song refers to. The promotional part of the music video will be filmed in a dark garage with instruments. The music video includes dark colors like blue black and grey to set our desired tone of electric and cold.

Production/ Campaign

      As for the marketing campaign, we began collecting ideas as our production process began. We first made the storyboard for our film which my whole group adjusted until we were happy with the product. We were sure that we wanted our band to wear something edgy and preppy to reflect their youth. An example here:


         We then came up with the idea of making the band a family band. We thought this would cater to larger audiences and attract more people. We found our main inspiration in the style 90's punk and thought it would make our artist stand out while also attracting people because this style is very popular at the moment. After we decided that we began filming. We had set two days to film. One was after school and was the promotional part, and one was on the weekend and was the storytelling part. The promotional part came first and this we did in one of our group members' garages, with blue LED lights and a skylight lamp to adhere to the cool tones we wanted to incorporate. We told all of our actors to bring button-up shirts and ties and we got to filming. We used one of our group member's Sony cameras to film the entirety of the music video. We thought this would give it a more professional and clean look. We filmed the promotional clips chronologically and checked them off when we finished. This ensured that we didn't miss any shots and that we had enough. For some shots, we specified in the storyboard that there would be inserts during the shot to make it more interesting, so we had to come up with additional angles to film. The filming process went smoothly and we finished after around 2 hours. Here are some pictures from our timing process:





        A few days later came our storytelling film day. We had a friend who was filming a project of her own and allowed us to film on one of her sets where there was a party occurring since we were already in her film. I was the girl in our music video so I wore something I think embodied my "bright" personality in the film, and we told the guy in the story to wear something plain. We had fewer shots to film and there were only two people that had to be in this part, so this day of filming was supposed to be easier. But, it did not turn out this way because we had to film this video whenever we weren't filming for her project which was not a lot. Eventually, after stressful takes and redos, we got all the shots we needed to complete our music video. 

Post-Production

        We decided to edit our video on Capcut which is the sister company to Tiktok, because of its easy accessibility, and cool effects. One of our group members decided to take on editing by herself, and she showed us her progress as she went to make sure we all liked it. The time after filming and before the due date was dedicated to working on our marketing campaign. As I said before, we had very loose plans for our marketing campaign, and it required a long group discussion to figure out what it was exactly we wanted to do. We went for a messy scrapbook look in our presentation to encapsulate the youthful and edgy sides of our band. Here is an example:



We decided on the name "All 4 One" because there are 4 members and they are all part of one family. This was a clever way of reminding audiences of their background.
My group decided to utilize social media like many artists, to reach our target audience. We also made posters (physical and digital), a website, and a TikTok challenge to further promote our artist. Even though our marketing campaign could've been better planned, my group and I came up with really good ideas nonetheless, and I think it turned out really well.

Presentation

Originally, our presentation was intended to be in person in front of our class, but due to many groups being behind schedule, our teacher decided to extend the deadline by 4 days but make the presentation virtual. This means that we would do a voiceover of our presentation explaining all of our choices and information. My group's presentation was 14 slides so we decided to make two people do 4 slides and two do 3. The two that do 4 slides will do the opening and closing slides since those are the easiest. I chose to voice the first 4 slides of the presentation which included the title slide, inspiration for the band, the family aspect, and the band's target audience. In that voiceover, I explain my group's thought process and intention behind certain choices, and I elaborate on the information presented on the slides.

Reflection

I really enjoyed this project. I liked the complexity of the task, and I liked the content associated with the task. Music has always been very important to me and learning about the way it is made and distributed has been really interesting to me. This project taught me the importance of good and thought-out planning and how big of an impact that can have on a project. It also taught me about time management and how you have to set due dates for yourself when doing a long project like this, which I think will be very helpful when developing my Cambridge portfolio. This assignment was also very overwhelming at the beginning because there was a lot that had to be done, but this taught me that if you break something really big into pieces it is not as bad and it is more manageable which is something that I need to remember when going on to start my Cambridge portfolio.




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