Song Promotion Crash Course

To summarise what I had learnt in GL, I worked with Clarissa, another member who wa s conducting GL with MV activities, to host a crash course on song promotion and marketing their work in general. By educating my juniors on the topic, it was a good way for me to assess what I had learnt, and gave me the opportunity to share about this topic in a simple and effective manner.

I decided to focus my course on the marketing of two main items: Yourself, and Your Music. By focusing on these two aspects, it would be easier for members to gauge what it is they would have to continue working on, and what they already knew.

YOURSELF

For this topic, I focused on branding yourself. How one forms an artist biography and how that impacts the way people viewed you as an artist. I first would dive into specific things about an artist that one might want to know, like their Name, Genres, and current projects. Talking about the importance of origin and future endeavors, I would continue to summarise the aspects of an artist, and adapt that into a format of biography that Bobby Borg shared in his book, making it to fit one for a Spotify Artist Bio. I would then briefly talk about building up an EPK and some sites they could use to create such items.

Afterwards I would talk more generally about physical and online presence - how performance opportunities would be great to get your name out there, and how the way you interact with your audience online as well was highly important. Audiences click with artists because of the way they carry themselves not just through their music, but in general life as well. Think about big artists like Billie Eilish, Charlie Puth - they aren't just liked for their amazing productions but because they have an entertaining personality about them and interact with their audience through humour and other entertaining content on social media. People love people! And that was the key takeaway I wanted to draw for them here.

YOUR MUSIC

When the aspects of promoting yourself was established, I would move on to talking about how one could go about promoting their music - mainly focusing on cross platform social media content, physical promotion, as well as other related items.

I wanted to focus the situation on just promoting one song, as this was the goal of the Artist Launch programme - for these bands to work on their single and promote it. I would talk through with them how they could note down the story of their song and create a visual concept for it by creating moodboards on Pinterest, and picking out key elements of the song that they could carry to visuals, using one of my own songs as an example.

Together, I'd want to go through some design fundamentals, like how to determine colours for your visuals based on the song's emotion, or use imagery and symbols - all with the goal of telling the story of the song visually. As this is specialised and more niche I would say, I'd choose to keep this as technically minimised as possible.

I would then focus on key items such as cover art, announcement posts, and touch on some other promotional material that they can carry ideas from.

OVERALL

I'd say through planning this crash course out, it really tested me to analyse what was the most important factors I've learnt about throughout my GL Journey, and being able to summarise and make the information condensed but not lose its informative elements really surprised me to see how much I'd actually learnt and processed it.

The actual crash course will take place in March, and with this plan laid out, I'd say I am quite excited to share this with the juniors.