Music Marketing Research and Brainstorming

    

Hello again blog!

We've started working in class on our Music Marketing project and begun the brainstorming process. In class we first choose our group, which was honestly the easiest part as there is three other people that I've been working well with throughout the year. After getting together, the first thing we started on was the case studies that would inform our project. We were assigned Rock, so we got started on choosing bands from across the genre that could aid us. The ones we settled on were from Parlophone records, Pink Floyd, and Coldplay; and representing from Capitol Records, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and The Beatles. Through the Beatles and Pink Floyd, we wanted to explore the classic rock, that pioneered and whose influence continues to reverberate through the genre today. Representing the newer side of Rock, we had Coldplay and Red Hot Chili Peppers, allowing us to see the strategies that Rock Bands are utilizing today. 

After creating our case studies, which focused on the distribution and marketing strategies of the previously mentioned bands, followed the brainstorming process for the project in which we'd utilize this research. This Music marketing project, involved us creating a band/artist and creating a full marketing plan around them, with even a music video included. In a moment of anticipation, we went with our flashdrive (old school) to go retrieve our song options from Ms. Stoklosa. They were all Rock but each had different vibes. Some of them were more fun, some more sad, more angry, more mellow, more exciting. In the end we decided to settle on "Shades of Black" from the Raconteurs, as we loved the dark aesthetic, and found that the exciting but dark mood had a lot of potential for brand creation. 

Once we had our song chosen, we got to work figuring out how we were gonna implement it into a brand. Would we be a band, a single artist, emo, sad, angry, artistic, mainstream, indie? There were a lot of questions going through our mind, but talking through our ideas we were able to settle on a concrete brand idea for a band named "Doldrum", (we deliberated on whether it would be "Doldrum", "the doldrums", or just "doldrums for a solid 10 minutes but I digress) an admittedly dark name, that we felt fit the dark mood we wanted to embrace for our brand.

 

 

In order to fit this despondent, dark mood we wanted to strive for  we settled on an equally dark color scheme with our main colors being black and white, and settling on the idea to create our first music video in Black and White. 

 

We also begun working on a storyboard for the project, and began to brainstorm the story we wanted to represent. We chose to go for a combination of an artistic/promotion music video, as it would allow us to express the stylized and alternative brand we wanted to create with Doldrum, while also building the image of our lead "Faye". After choosing the style of Music video we wanted to tell we gathered around and begin throwing out ideas for how we wanted it to go. With all of our many ideas, it was at first a bit daunting to create a full cohesive idea, but eventually by building on each other's ideas, we were able to create something which mixed all of our collective input to make something greater than we each could have individually created. Ending up with a video that would show our main character fighting through their emotions, with the symbolisms of flowers (as if grieving), being thrown into pool and weighed down, and finally escaping from that in the end, when they became atune with their emotions. 

Our main character somberly walking alone holding flowers, paralleling how people grieve at funerals as if grieving for themselves.

 

Our Main character falling uncontrollably into a pool, representing their fight against their despair.