A New Era of Music Marketing: A Puzzle or a Path?
In the world of music marketing, personalization reigns supreme. It’s high time that the broader music industry recognizes and embraces this fact. Sometimes experimentation does not go as far as expected, but innovation and sync in deployment have always garnered much higher traction. Today, with much more stringent algorithmic systems, and two-fold more releases per day, it’s become too dense for any standard procedure.
Figuring out how to put your music forward in today’s industry landscape is much more of a puzzle than a path. With technology constantly shifting to accommodate micro-markets, and the drivers of music distributions maintaining poor alignment with actual musician needs, the challenges of an unsigned artist have quintupled in size.
Leveraging Platform Fanbases
Artist-to-community interactions must be a fluid approach; the artists need to leverage trends, creating a dynamic environment where artists need a fluid strategy to stay constantly connected with audiences and identify micro-opportunities to capitalize on. TikTok has become one of the essential members of this adaptation in the market. By mobilizing fans with low to midrange following, you can pull faster traffic to a music video.
Take a young prodigy m$sha for example. He has mobilized a TikTok formula and 156k+ new fans to land himself collaborations with Jay Critch, Trippie Redd and more. Because he has a song with Trippie Redd dropping in a few weeks, his socials have been fully mobilized to conduct the community orchestra. For a debut track coming into the industry, this type of start is usually reserved for a talented few. As your career moves forward, your biggest challenge is carrying the fans forward. On a multi-platform structure, you can optimize longevity by leveraging the network.
Leveraging the Talent
Does the artist do one thing in particular that stands out from the created music? Is it a vocal? Instrumental? Personality? By recognizing and leveraging that unique strength, they can overperform in their field. For many, the journey begins in the studio and the live element or physicality of their music remains untapped. As an agency, it is imperative that your team finds out what that is and use it as the main conductor of the forgoing campaign. An interesting case out of Chicago is Jade Latrice, a young artist who has completed a string of performances in her past and transitioned to the studio much later in her career. With a league of followers on YouTube, Jade has been putting her vocal talents at the forefront of her career and her cover performances.
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Her performance videos embody the true essence of musical authenticity and an unfiltered connection with the audience, hitting a sweet spot that boosts viewer interaction exponentially. The power of live content is in its raw, real-time engagement that platform algorithms favor, providing a more prominent visibility and a broader organic reach every time she takes the stage.
Jade’s success story doesn’t stop there. Striding her path with remarkable independence, she has managed to chart on both Apple Music and iTunes, all while remaining independent. Her journey, indeed, is a testament to the boundless potential of talent combined with the power of personalized content.
Leverage Your Message
Messaging in a campaign is everything. The artist is supposed to be working through their message to bring in the crowds. As an agency, crafting this can’t be inorganic, you need to follow what is already readily available in the environment. You can scale the message through recent achievements or you can even take the opportunity to release a new branch of the artist’s branding. Ultimately, you are looking to feed your base while attracting new audiences. Recently, with the location switch at Eurovision, I had my eyes on the Ukrainian team Duo Tvorchi and the star performer Tina Karol. Unlike the duo, Tina’s performance had an out-of-world kick to it, and rather than being drenched in the political narrative was actually a heart-shaped spectacle. With fully costumed dance crews, Tina maintained the narrative of peace and love all while representing the message that has been tearing the world in half. Through her music and public persona, Tina Karol conveys a message of unity, harmony and cultural exchange which has been integral to her music’s expansion in the U.S.
Leveraging Persona
Unlike a brand, a persona is a public or digital image you leave behind. A combination of your attitude, on-camera catchphrases, mannerisms and, of course, how you carry your background. In the case of some emerging artists, the person behind the music is far from the common narratives we see passing by. Not to demerit anyone’s story, but there are some actual rocket scientists out there who happen to make music. And on social media, this packs a particular punch. Take recent Cannes World Film Festival Winner and licensed Doctor Mohammed K. Paika. Through a series of personal passions, deep creative relationships and building on his fandom, his fanbase is due to a long history of community building particularly on a spiritualist audience vector. Mobilizing his multi-professional background, Paika has become both more than a distributor of good advice and spiritual parabola, but an authority on a variety of topics close to his studies. Leveraging your persona means having fun people believe in more than your music, it means having people respect your ambitions, which is priceless.
There is an absolute need to customize marketing and promotion campaigns in music that involve a leveraged approach to the traditional formula. Be it platform fanbases, embracing and amplifying unique talents or not overbearing a message, the agency has a much more dense market to navigate now and it needs to be met with novelty. When betting on the artist’s strengths rather than fitting them into a promotional mold, your agency will be able to unlock that artist’s scalable asset, which will make the difference in the marathon of their career.