Before creating proper and effective self-promoting skills to share an artist’s music efficiently, an artist must create, understand and establish their image or brand. Where does an artist start with creating their own music branding?
Creating music and music branding is such an impactful process. When an artist creates musical content, emotions can pour out their bodies into the form of a song, relating to listeners everywhere around the world.
An artist’s duty or mission starts from creating the content.
Throughout my music artist career, I constantly had to define and transform my brand or image. It is a crucial part of a music artist’s development.
Defining your music branding as an artist foreshadows where and how your career will unfold.
Although it can be a very tiresome process, if formed correctly, brand development will ensure many positive outcomes towards an artist’s career.
Here are fundamental steps into how artists can create their own music branding.
Why are You Making Music?
In terms of a company or product, brand development helps communicate to the customer what the company or product does.
Simple, yet dynamic. For example, let’s create a smoothie store, called Sweetest Smoothies. The smoothie store can communicate what they do simply by stating:
“Hey! We make tasty smoothies for everyone!”
Author of Start With Why by Simon Sinek suggests that brands produce success by communicating why companies do what they do.
Sweetest Smoothies could produce to the public something of this nature to better their brand.
Sweetest Smoothies believes that “healthy” and “sweet” form a beautiful bond for all things love and happiness and makes life worth living!
We intend to facilitate this by creating delicious, tasty, and healthy smoothies that bring out one’s inner sunshine for everyone regardless of age!
This statement entices my taste buds to want a taste of happiness.
Musicians can approach their brand the same way! Artists can question what they do through understanding what compels them to create and share with the world their talents.
Additionally, the type of music an artist makes as well as their perception of music will bring in more music listeners!
What is Your Artistic Purpose?
Many artists that make prominent success in the music industry have a clear perspective of their purpose in creating music! Questions such as:
“What are you passionate about?”,
“What will people pay for that drives my economic engine?”
“What do you do best in regards to your impact on the world?”
An artist must first understand what parts of being a musician they are passionate about. It could be song-writing, performing, or producing music that sets your ambitions on fire.
Secondly, an artist must have a very specific and realistic goal to add fuel to their economic engine.
For producers, it could be how much they will charge per beat, or how an artist will charge for performances.
Having this understanding will then allow the artist to approach collaborations professionally.
Lastly, is to define the artist’s uniqueness. Although vague, an artist must take the time to truly understand what makes them different!
Once they do this, the artist will have a clear and concise approach to marketing their material.
What is Your Music Branding?
Defining the brand centres around the artist’s authenticity. Fans want to connect with the artist on a personal level rather than an artificial level.
However, in regards to image, an artist can create a vision or mood board of inspiration.
The artist can create a document or physical board of 3-5 other artists that they admire and could lend to defining their brand.
Of course, no other artist is doing what the artist does authentically, however doing this will create a starting point for the artist’s development.
The next step would be for the artist to consolidate and communicate the research of their unique position in the music world into two to three sentences.
This will be the artist’s core brand statement.
Following this step, music artists will need to establish five core values that fit the brand statement.
These values could be entities such as climate change, racial discrimination, inclusivity, queerness, and many other values that will lend to the development of their brand to lure in prospective music listeners/followers.
The final step would be to set and define the tone of the brand with five or six keywords. These words may include “edgy”, “sultry”, “loud” or “angelic”.
To establish a long-lasting following, artists must develop these keywords to ensure the seeking music listener gravitates to their music efficiently.
Remember: followers cannot do all of the work when finding new artists to listen to.
Once the artist has developed these aspects, the artist has constructed the foundation of their brand!
The artist should not worry because the brand is continuously developing and growing over time.
However, an artist needs to maintain the growth of the brand and take the necessary steps to nurture the brand to reach optimal success.
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