Branding in the Music Industry

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THE IMPORTANCE OF BRANDING IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

As a student of music industries management, I've learned a great deal about what it takes for a music artist or band to achieve a level of success. What a lot of people don't realize is just how crucial branding in the music industry is. In this day of digital media and social networking, it is both more difficult and easier than ever to get your foot in the door. With so many new artists and bands emerging and trying their hand at a career as performers, it is easy for others to get lost in the shuffle. To really stand out from the crowd and start on your road to success, you need to brand yourself (or your band) and put yourself out there as much as possible.

In this lens I will discuss the importance of branding your band and treating your music career as a business and not just a hobby. I will also share some simple tips on how to get started with the branding process and how to make yourself stand out from the rest.

Establishing Yourself as a Brand

Treat your music as a business

One of the most important and valuable steps you can take in your career as a musician is to build yourself, or your band, as a brand. If you are looking for a successful career in the music industry as a performer, and your ultimate goal is to make a living from your music, then you need to treat yourself as an artist, or your band, as a business.

If you start to take your music seriously and look at is as more than just a hobby, you are well on your way to achieving the success that you are striving for. To make a living from creating and performing music, you need to invest (both time-wise and financially) in your band and market and promote it as you would a product from any other kind of business.

Create a Unique Logo

One of the best ways you can brand your band is to create a logo that people can automatically associate with it. As I specialize in the hard rock/metal genres of music, I have added a picture of the logo of a well-known, successful band - Avenged Sevenfold. The logo - known as the Deathbat - has become synonymous with the band, and millions of people around the world recognize it and automatically know it is Avenged Sevenfold without having to even have the band's name anywhere on it.

Creating a striking and unique logo for your band that can be used on merchandise, posters, banners and around the Internet is a huge step in establishing your band as its own brand. Once people start to see and recognize your logo, it will be much harder for them to forget who you are. If the logo is really cool looking, people will be proud to wear it and show it off for you.

Creating an Image

The image of your band is sometimes just as important as your music. Make sure your band LOOKS like a band and carries an image that your targeted demographic can relate to. Many musicians greatly underestimate the important of image in the music industry and fail to realize that the business has moved beyond just the sounds of a band. Image goes beyond just the visual aesthetics, too. How you carry yourself and behave also plays a huge part in how people see you. Aspire to be a band that people can look up to in one way or another. Send a message that your fans can take on board and give them something to BELIEVE in.

The importance of branding

Any marketing guru will tell you that the biggest and most important aspect of marketing is branding. This is as essential in the music business as it is in any other. Potential fans need to be able to remember and associate with you. With so many other artists and bands out there, it is important that you take the necessary steps to stand out from the crowd and not just fade into the background. Once you start to treat your band as a business and understand the importance and value of branding yourself, things will start to fall into place and you'll be taking steps in the right direction. The brand of your band is the foundation of your business, and once the foundation is laid you can build upon it. Without a starting block, a business cannot be built. When it comes to your career, you don't want to be going around in circles, you want to move forward.

If you're serious about your music career, want to learn more about marketing in the music industry and are ready to take your career to the next level, Music Marketing Classroom provides some valuable information in the form of "cheat sheets" using non-traditional strategies you can implement to expand your fanbase

BLOG; the new age marketing

http://newagemarketing.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/branding-in-the-music-industry/

BRANDING IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

February 3, 2010 at 11:40 pm Sushant Gole Leave a comment

The great Phillip Kotler says that a brand is a seller’s promise to deliver a specific set of features, benefits and service consistently. According to Al Ries, a brand is a symbol, a name or a logo that someone owns in the minds of the customer.These definitions of a brand holds true across industries. The music industry may work differently than other traditional industries, but then is it so different as to be alien to the concept of a brand? Do we have brands in the music industry?

Take a look at the picture on the left. Does it remind you of anyone?  It  would be next to impossible to find a person who listens to music and not know the pictures represents the great King of Pop Michael Jackson. The man was a perfect example of a branding in the music industry.The signature Fedora hat and sequined glove symbolized none other than him. They represent the symbol part that the definition of a brand talks about.

Now take a look at this picture on the left again. The name itself screams the style of music they make. Heavy Metal. And they have remained loyal to their name throughout their music career with heavy metal songs. No person will ever look at the name and buy a CD expecting to find mellow romantic songs inside. That is delivering a specific set of features consistently part of brand definition.

I once read that the great guitarist Eric Clapton built his own guitar by using parts of three Fender Stratocaster guitars and named it ‘Blackie’. I was touched by the bond that he shared with his guitar to the point of naming it. Now when I look at it critically, with all due respects to his love, Clapton had been shrewd. He had created a brand out of his guitar. That again was a symbol, something which reminded people of Clapton every time they saw his guitar.

These are just some of the examples to make you aware of branding in music Industry. In the music industry, branding is as prevalent as it would be in any other industry.

Pop music as branding...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/sep/02/pop-music-branding

Earlier this year, Black Eyed Peas leader will.i.am gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal about his group's success. "I consider us a brand," he said, adding such observations as: "Here's how the consumer can benefit from the collaboration." Of course, this kind of business speak is the common language of the music industry, but it's rare to hear stars talk it. The idea of describing a pop group in terms of branding feels wrong to most fans: there's something distressing, almost icky about it, even coming from this most self-manufactured of bands.

Why is this? The influence of business thinking on music is usually seen as a one-way deal: marketing and branding corrupt musicians' creativity by turning it into a process. But it's more fluid than that: even in an imploding industry, marketers and business people can be desperately envious of musicians and what's seen as their freewheeling individualism. The boardroom-ready language of business is crossing over into pop at the same time as thousands of laid-off marketers are taking to LinkedIn to declare themselves social media "rock stars". This month sees the publication of Brian Halligan and David Meerman Scott's book Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, which fits four decades' worth of guitar solos and weed smoking into the context of recent American marketing. The Dead "co-created" their image with their fans; they gave content (bootlegs) away; they followed passion not fashion. In other words, their example jibes nicely with the current business fad for being "disruptive" and surrendering control to your customers – or at least talking a lot about it.

Indeed, pop seems to do intuitively what brand managers work for years to learn. It creates vivid images, it distils profound ideas into single hits of feeling, it projects larger-than-life symbols and icons on to the screen of reality. The 4AD label, which turned 30 in August, remains the most successful example of branding I've ever seen. Though Steve Jobs may be a genius, even he would have struggled to shift Ultra Vivid Scene albums – but each Vaughan Oliver 4AD design worked to create a sense of shared purpose and trust that gave sometimes under-par records an aura of importance.

Of course, 4AD's approach is usually called an "aesthetic", which sounds a lot more respectable than "branding". And it's true that part of the hostility towards the idea of bands as brands comes from the language of business being so leaden and clinical. "Brand" itself is a strangely imprecise word – everyone intuits what it means, but turns mystical when defining it. In this, it's a bit like "soul" or "rock" – you know it when you find it. Some acknowledge that the word lacks romance. In the mid-2000s, Saatchi & Saatchi proclaimed that brands were dead and we should now call them "lovemarks", which sounds like a Hallmark Cards take on S&M. Or, indeed, a minor 4AD album.

On the other hand, we may not enjoy phrases like "brand halo" or "cross-platform experience", but we live them every time we watch a new video on YouTube or trust a label's latest signing. Our recoil from the language of branding isn't just a reaction to its ugliness, but to the sense of having everyday acts of fandom classified like this at all. As last week's X Factor AutoTune row showed, people are picky about the kind of behind-the-scenes information they want to know. X Factor is one of the most intensively researched music shows in the world, with individual contestants given week-on-week makeovers based on the ebb and flow of Twitter opinions. The audience likes the results, but would surely not want to see the charts and slides that go into them.

Anyone who succeeds in pop is good at branding, no matter their other qualities. But that is exactly why talking about it is an unwelcome pulling back of the curtain to show the banal mechanics behind the glamour of music. Following will.i.am by imagining bands as brands tells no lies about them. It tells boring truths, which is a great deal worse.