Euphorion's World
Wed
07
Jan
2009
How to promote a music-band
Besides sports and poetry music always was another passion for me. There were absolutely no musicians in my family but we had always a strong relationship to music.
Despite the fact that we were always music consumers and no creators we are able to distinguish between “good” and “bad” music. My father showed his favorite music to me, my brother did it the same way, and still today we can just listen to music and discuss it.
During my studies I always thought about the relationship between music and marketing and that directly leads me to the question: How can you promote music? Is it more like a product, or a service and how can we sell it to other people?
Searching for answers on the internet I found some very helpful blogs about promoting music especially music-bands. That could also be a field of interest I could imagine to work in after my studies.
Who is Edward Mendoza?
One of the most exciting blogs I found on the internet was created by Edward Mendoza – a music video director from Hollywood, California.
Mr. Mendoza seems to work especially for hip-hop bands – which certainly does not represent my taste of music – but he has created a very exploratory blog which allows you to look behind the scenes of shooting videos for music artists. And the even more interesting matter of fact is that he is one of the video directors working with artists who are not rich at all. Moreover he seems to understand his business very well.
“Why do artists want to sound great but look bad?”
…is one of my favorite posts he published so far. In that article Mr. Mendoza claims that musicians nowadays spend thousands of dollars for mastering their albums but contrary to that they are unwilling to spend some money for a good video. Furthermore he points out that:
“Having a professional looking video is more important today than it was ten years ago, because of video publishing sites such as Youtube, Imeem and Myspace”.
Another reason mentioned by Mr. Mendoza is that in the past artists weren’t able to show their video on MTV without having connections to weighty people working there. Finally the author compares this new freedom for musicians with the new opportunities of writers which allow them to blog their thoughts on the internet without paying anything.
The cruel consequences this new freedom could have for the general public is shown in the video below (this “band” made it into the German Top 20 Single Charts).
How to stand out from the mass?
“The image you portray is part of your brand, the same way you do not want to hand out a flyer that looks amature, a poorly shot video decreases the perceived value of your performance.”
Despite the fact that Mr. Mendoza advises to shoot a high quality video clip in order to stand out from the overwhelming mass of music artists nowadays, I maintain that you can succeed without producing an expensive music video. Either these bands or artists try to be outstanding by creating an image of not being perfect but authentic or they use the web to start some guerilla marketing because they cannot afford expensive music videos. Or even both are possible at the same time.
What do you think? Do you need money to be successful???
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posted by Euphorion
