Music Marketing Blog Post

 Our project is a Music Marketing PowerPoint/Music video. For this project, we had to use a provided song to create a music video and then create a marketing campaign for a “new” music artist/group, building the brand from the bottom up and using this marketing campaign to introduce your musician(s) to the public. To begin our project we chose our song from a set of 4 rock songs provided to us by our teacher. We choose “Something from Nothing” by the Foo Fighters. After choosing our song we were instructed to create four case studies for bands so we could get further knowledge on bands marketing/distribution techniques. Researching this information helped us for when it was our turn to find out how to market and distribute our band, we could kind of mimic some clever techniques the bands we researched used. Weston experienced some challenges trying to find out the marketing techniques because the information wasn’t available online, we had to do deep dives into the bands/artists' social media to be able to find information. After finishing the case studies it was time to start planning out what we wanted for our band( fake names) the vibe/style, the target audience/demographic, the name, etc. We came up with “Parasomnia”, and we decided we wanted it to be similar to the band “Pierce the Veil”, and our audience was going to range from the ages of 14 to mid-20s.

Now that we had our basic research it was time to create our music video. I and my partners sat down in class and listened to the song repeatedly because the goal of the music video was to represent the meaning and vibe of the song. After listening for quite a while we came up with the idea for a “story music video” of a guy who just got fired from his job and goes from nothing to this successful rapper/artist, pretty basic but we decided it fit well with the theme of the song (the song is called “something from nothing”). Next on our plan, we had to decide our actors, location, props, etc. We decided to meet up on a Saturday to film everything we could. We chose to film at the Hard Rock Hotel, but with it being private property we were kicked out sadly so we changed locations to a parking lot in front of the Hard Rock so we could still capture the guitar. We filmed a couple of scenes, mostly of the band singing along and playing their instruments to the song. The band was a total of 5 with the lead single 3 bassists and the drummer. We filmed close-ups of the musicians playing their instruments, long shots of the 
entire band, and some medium/close-ups of the lead singer singing along. After that, it was time to record all of the story parts of the music video. We began with filming the before the music starts scenes of the boss and main character arguing and then quitting, this scene contained over-the-shoulder shots for dialogue and two shots. Then we filmed the main character walking away angrily to his car and getting angry so he turns on the radio to relax when he turns up the volume the music starts playing. We do a long shot of the car driving away. Now the main character is going to change himself so we recorded scenes of him getting a tattoo changing his hair and getting piercings. After this, he begins writing lyrics goes to sleep, and wakes up as an internet sensation. We used a variety of shots and movements such as close-ups, tight close-ups, medium shots, long shots, POV shots, over-the-shoulder, pan, and zoom movements.

We commenced our filming process and it was time to begin editing. We used a mobile app called “VN”. We began by placing all the scenes into the editing software. Then we commenced by shortening/ elongating the shots. We also played around with the lighting to advance our music video. Editing is a challenging process especially when trying to match the singer's voice to the lyrics of the song. They could be singing at different tempos and it takes time and dedication to try and get the best possible match. Editing also takes a lengthy time because there are multiple shots taken for each scene to try to eliminate as many mistakes as possible, so it takes a lot of reviewing all the footage, merging it, and cutting it, to try and get the best results. Currently, we are still in the editing process because after doing some peer reviewing people were able to point out mistakes we missed. So we are taking time to refilm those shots that didn’t meet the project expectations. What is next for our process is to create our marketing campaign PowerPoint. Since we have to pitch our ideas to a group of “potential investors and music consumers.” We have to do this on a PowerPoint and we have to include our marketing/distribution practices, an overview of the brand, samples of marketing products, and the selling point. We already have the marketing products and some of the distribution plans, but we will continue to work hard to make sure our “campaign/project is successful