Branding Research

 

"How to build an artist profile"

It is most likely that your audience is glued to social media regardless of your genre. Instagram has recently passed a billion active users while Facebook boasts about two billion daily active users themselves. These numbers blow the competition of SoundCloud and Bandcamp out of the water.

Did you know that YouTube is technically the most popular music streaming service right now, beating Spotify and Apple Music? Making sure you’re set with how to promote your music on YouTube can help ensure you’ve got visibility on the best channels.

You shouldn’t worry about doing too much self-promotion given that’s what social media marketing for musicians is all about.
For Example. There’s no need to be shy away about whatever is new in your life if it be a new song? Upcoming album? or even getting away and hitting the road?

Let your audience know.

Consider how to promote your music on Instagram which can be challenging thanks to things like disloyal algorithms and how fast social media moves in the first place, but frequent hype posts are totally fair game.

Additionally, it’s a smart move to put together frequent fliers and announcements which are perfect for pinned tweets or posts. That way, anyone visiting your profile can know exactly what you have going on.

The 21st Century ‘business’ of music like any other business, requires a proper approach, saleable content and brand identity. Many musicians who have great content fail due to the lack of two very basic things that define them as artists: The ability to connect with the right audience, and having effective music branding ideas.

A brand is anything that defines or represents you. It is a unique point like a name, symbol, caption or attribute that helps people identify you and differentiate you from others in the trade.

Most new artists have the idea of stop producing music and only focus on branding, however that is wrong. You need something to brand, and that is your content. As they say, "content is king", it definitely makes a lot of difference when your music is good and it helps in the reach of your music through sharing and/by word of mouth. 

Branding works in different ways. You could be famous even when you are less talented. That depends on what kind of audience you cater to as well as your brand image and reputation.

These are some ways to improve your brand:

• Defining your music.

Own your music because it is personal. Your character, your perspective towards various things in life define your music so that is exactly what your audience should connect to, the real you and your real music. Once you understand this, you will be able to take the first step towards brand image strategy development as an artist. This will also be important when sending your tracks to music blogs to review.

• Where did it go wrong?

Most of the other local bands were rearranging famous country songs and the audience loved it. So we did it too. And yet again, our audience got even more confused, and at an individual level, I was too unwilling to perform those numbers. 

We started playing music which we did not enjoy ourselves and eventually our audience started splitting away. What used to be passion and fun became more of a liability to perform for booked events.

• Setting up the logo and colour selection.

Create a brand image – a logo for yourself or your band. This will help people identify you. The logo should speak for your genre of music and the stage character that you wish to portray as an artist. If Iron Maiden used a magic wand in their logo, you could easily misjudge their genre. But the sharp-edged letters in their logo clearly states the kind of music you can expect from them – even if you have never heard the band.

• Branding provides contextual cues to hook new listeners, which builds your audience

Today’s music discovery ecosystem lacks storytelling. Streaming services — your first line of defense for gaining exposure and from lo-fi hip-hop producers to classical artists to new audiences, the discovery process is essentially a spreadsheet.

• Branding makes marketing more efficient by relying on high impact assets

Our visual memory is more powerful than our audible memory. When people see a song, not just hear it, their ability to recall the song is stronger so promoting music with visuals will enhance the memorability of your project, thus helping you stand out from the 39,999 other songs uploaded to Spotify every day.

Secondarily, social media are visual platforms that depend on visuals that stand out. Strong visuals will make people care by striking a stronger connection with new and existing fans.

Kevin Harris....