Music Marketing Campaign

The Pop Genre

Pop music is the genre meant for popular music as any hits nowadays are in the pop genre. A common theme is seen throughout this music of repeated choruses, melodic tunes, and catchy lyrics that creates a sense of familiarity for the listeners. This feeling is what makes people enjoy pop music so much. The typical target audience for the pop genre are teen girls ranging from the ages 13-25, and most are in the working class. Their jobs may include part-time jobs, full time jobs, or even being a student.

Marketing Trends

Some of the most popular trends seen in the Pop genre are the use of teaser trailers leading to the release of a music video, album, or single. One of the most successful examples was seen with Ariana Grande’s song “Thank U, Next.” She released teasers that were each a couple of seconds long featuring well known celebrities. This caused massive excitement between not only her fans, but those who were fans of the Mean Girls movie as well, since she made her music video a Mean Girls Parody.

Another marketing trend seen is the creative single song release Billie Eilish and her team does. Although she composes a full album and markets the album as a whole, she releases each song one at a time. In doing so, she is continuously entertaining her fans and keeping their attention. Not only that, but she gives them time to truly listen and obtain their own message for her music. These techniques are effective for the marketing of her music.

Developing the Brand 

         

Immediately before starting our marketing campaign we came up with a brand for our band, which was capturing the feeling of youth and freedom. After establishing this, we took several approaches to convey this feeling to our listeners that wasn’t just through the music. Through the use of social media, merchandise and live events our band is able to do this. For example, on social media we constantly used the same hashtags such as #youngandfree, #yandf and #newband in order for both bring awareness to the band and to keep this theme of living young and free throughout the Instagram page.

Next we chose the best locations in which our target audience would enjoy the performances. Keeping in mind that we don’t have a large audience or much money yet, we chose small but popular venues in locations such as Miami and Wynwood. These places were great choices because they are both realistic and these places are locations where our supporters would typically spend time in. Another reason these venues were chosen is because they truly capture the essence of youth.

Our merchandise also included this same phrase “young and free” to promote both the name of the band and the feeling we wanted our music to convey.

Merchandise

As shown, most of the merch designs are very simple which we found to be the best selling within our target audience. It’s more likely that the fans would wear a simple, but meaningful phrase such as “young and free’, rather than a photo of the band on a basic sweatshirt. We offered some variety by using different colors and products, yet still keeping to the band’s theme of two cool colors, blue and yellow. Since the band is still up and coming, we knew that we weren’t at the point where we could create an extensive collection, so as a group we chose the products we believed would be the most popular for our target audience. This explains why we made the choice to sell hats, phone cases, and stickers as well. These products don’t cost as much to produce but are still great items to represent the band.

Lessons Learned

One of the biggest things I learned throughout this project was the effectiveness of appropriate planning. The production of the video took a lot of time, but it was mainly because we changed the original idea we had. This led to having to go with a simple, promotional music video with no entertaining storytelling aspect which can be difficult for a new band to pull off. I believe that with effective planning and being truly passionate with the idea, would have led to an easier production process and being more content with the results.

However, this idea was completely different with the marketing campaign. I believe our group had a couple of creative ideas, but our campaign would’ve been better if we didn’t choose to focus so much on the rubric and instead accepted the spontaneous, exciting ideas.

Overall I learned that sometimes planning can have different effects, but I hope to learn from the mistakes made on this project in order to improve for the next one. I will also try to encourage the outgoing ideas and be more accepting of them.