Researching the Music Industry PT1

My project was to plan the marketing for Music Vox's album - a MUSIC related item. Thus it was important that I understood how the music business worked in that aspect. The distributor that I believe our CCA uses, called "Routenote", has quite an informative video resource library on their YouTube channel, and I was able to pinpoint a few that I thought would be helpful on my learning journey. With the marketing side of things, "Burstimo" was a YouTube channel I had previously been following for some informative music marketing related content - but now was the perfect time to really take a deeper look into those. I also managed to read some chapters of a book on Music Business that helped me to shape Music Vox's identity and brand a bit better.

The notes I took down can be read here, but continue reading below for my takeaways!

On Routenote, I looked at videos pertaining more to the laws tied with music, from the different types of copyrights and forms of identification that songs had. I realised that Music Vox would be the identity that holds the phonographic copyright as they provided the resources to record and mix the tracks for streaming, and our members would hold the composition copyright, as we owned the melody and lyrics. Our venture would also definitely be considered an album as there are around 9-10 tracks.

Videos like "10 Secrets to Promoting Your Music" got me to reflect more on how Music Vox was promoting original music at that point, and I realise we didn't really utilise our website as much as we could. I decided that perhaps updating our Music Vox website with a page for the album would be nice to have, as people often view our website for updates and information from our CCA, thus the album being a special project having a feature page would entice our audience to check it out. The Routenote videos also gave me ideas to utilise our songs as potential TikTok audios that can turn into challenges.

On Burstimo's page, the first video I watched was of a podcast interview with Tom Nield from Landmrk - a company that strives to create interactive experiences and help extend an artist’s hand to their audience. From scavenger hunt campaigns, to concert seating hunts for the best seats, this interview allowed me to explore what could be with the album launch. It reminded me of the possibilities with AR from an earlier speaker session from Adobe MAX Conference, and I decided it was worth a try expanding on this idea of interactive campaign idea.

As Burstimo had multiple videos with marketing experts from big music companies such as Warner Brothers, Syco, and the likes, it was highly informative to see how music marketing was viewed from an experienced perspective. Videos like "Why Your Music Marketing Strategy Isn't Working", where one of Burstimo's hosts went through a few different people's social medias to see the type of marketing they were having, I realised some things like grid posts, where different posts in the grid lined up to form a visual was not especially good for marketing as good as they looked in the feed. It wasn't engaging and overall not something interactive for the audiences. This put some of my ideas on hold as such posts was what we would usually opt for with big projects such as the TP Band Collaboration last year, or even the release of the EP.

Besides the online content I researched, I also read some of the chapters in this book by Bobby Borg, a musician now sharing his garnered knowledge over the years with the beginner musicians of the world. As I was keeping up with the rest of my school work, it was hard for me to read a lot of the books I wanted to, as time was simply not on my side. However, the first few chapters of this book condensed all the information in the whole book, which was great!

From those few chapters, I grew an understanding of how as you progressed with music, it not only becomes an art, but a serious business as well. Using the pointers that Bobby clearly laid out in his marketing guide, I was able to slowly develop an idea for who our target audience was, what I hoped Music Vox became, and all the in betweens.

Overall, from this bulk of research, I understood more that marketing was really about just reaching your target audience, and in today's context utilising not just online services but physical as well is something that when fully touched based on, can push your product into the green. When we moved to digital platforms, we lost touch of physical content, which is why merchandise and live performances were important as it allowed audiences to draw closer to the artist in a tangible sense, but besides those big end goals, what was important was the EXPERIENCE - so that was what I strived to provide in my GL at least.