Music Marketing: The Full Process

 

    The star of the show is Javan, a rising star with a new song: Me and your Mama. However, in order to make it a hit, there is a lot of process behind it for marketing, distribution, and production. Our group started by compiling a chart of well known and renowned artists and conducting research. We specifically looked at the marketing and distribution techniques that made them famous. We looked at two main companies, Republic Records and RCA Records. The four artists we researched were The Weeknd, Vera Blue, Alicia Keys, and Dojo cat. We looked into the Weeknd in particular because he was another R&B/Soul artist that had a similar style to what we were going for. For example, we looked at how he opts to create music videos to go with his music and post on his social media accounts such as twitter to promote his work.

    After doing our research, it was time to come up with our own plan. We would first choose a target audience, and create a music video to go along Javan's song. Our plan was for our target audience to be teens and young adults, so the video would be tailored for that audience. We decided to make a video about a breakup. A young man would be depicted being sad, thinking back on the days with his ex-girlfriend. When he saw her with another man, he would go into a rage, kicking cans and making a mess. The reason we chose to create a music video about breakup is because it would appeal to our target audience. Since teens and young adults are more active in creating relationships, many of them have likely gone through a breakup, which lets them relate to the video.

 

    To develop the video, we first decided to get together and meet up at a place. We would then film Javan in multiple shots and angles in different places looking sad and depressed. We would take multiple shots, and then choose the best one to use. Do to a lack of an actor for a girl, one of the group members who had a girlfriend decided to film at his home with his own girlfriend. After the shots had been collected, it was time for editing. I myself was the editor, and I specifically tried to edit the video in theme with the song. The scenes would cut to the beat of the song, effects would be applied, etc. If I had insufficient footage, I filmed a few scenes of my own and asked the star to send a few videos. For example, this is were I came up with the idea of the symbolical Cola. In the film, the main character is depicted drinking Coke, and then throwing it on the ground, crushing it, and kicking it, spilling soda. I filmed a slow-mo of water mixed with food coloring to look like Cola, to be symbolic of the singer's anger as he inflicts his rage on Coke cans. After finishing, we took some more inspiration from our artist research, creating a marketing plan for Javan. We created a social media page and created merchandise.

 

 

    In the end, the marketing and production for Javan's song Me and your Mama was rough, but worth it in the end. I personally think we did a great job of devising a plan for getting the song the acclaim it deserves. Some questionable decisions were made, such as making the cola symbolic, but in the end I think it actually improved the video in the long run. The lack of resources we had as a small group only forced us to get more creative and in turn made the project far better. Of course, there are things we could have done better, such as creating more marketing and distribution tactics than just merch and a twitter account, which was too similar to the artists we studied, but overall, I learned even though you may lack sufficient resources, you can always get a piece of media to get popular, and it's possible for anyone to be the next big hit.