How We Made: Our Music's Marketing

 

In our music marketing project, my team discussed and found ways to successfully market the song "Me and your Mama." We began with listening to the four song options that we were provided with. After getting a feel for the songs, we discussed our choices, and we seemed to have an attachment to the song by Childish Gambino - Me and Your Mama. It sounded nice and seemed versatile in terms of what we could do with it to promote it. Out of every song choice we have, it was simply the most distinctive and we were really looking forward to using it creatively. We listened to the euphonious tune until we were able to get an idea of what we could do for a music video. Although the music would be adaptable with many choices, it made it harder to choose something specific. We decided that it would be about a man who's fallen for someone, despite them already being with someone. Other ideas included an abstract plane of existence, and even utilization of drugs, but we worried it would be over the top for high school.

We did some research into the genre of the song, R&B, and looked into other works that other artists have done for the genre; Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Drake, etc. These artists in particular had music videos for their music, so we studied them as inspiration for our promotion. The Weeknd's music videos have very cool and dark coloring, and is the type to feature the artist themself singing in it, as well as telling some kind of story utilizing film techniques. We decided to adopt this story telling medium for our video, thinking of different shots and angles that create an effect similar to those found in other R&B works. In order to collaborate better and give our ideas better, even outside of a Microsoft Teams meeting call, we exchanged phone numbers and emails so that we could have a Whatsapp group chat and a google docs document we could all work on. This is where we planned specific parts of the video and what angles we could use before completing an entire storyboard.

In the Whatsapp group chat, we simply discussed the role of people and anything important to mention. The google doc is where the efficient work would be; describing the plot of the video, making a list of angles to use, etc. Using a google doc would make it easy for any group member to add onto the plan, such as making other suggestions for the plot or adding another possible angle that what improve the quality of the video, such as proposing a dutch angle. Going into the song itself, we listened it together on a teams meeting call, since talking is more efficient than typing in text. We listened to the song together and discussed specific feelings we had about it, and then brainstormed the correct angles to use, later adding them to the list. Some felt that the video should start slowly, or that there should be a POV shot of the ground to symbolize sadness, etc. The collaboration efforts were all carefully planned out and different means of communications were utilized in order to create a good promotion for the artist.