Music Marketing Blog #2

     Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a music marketing project to not only make a music video revolving around a new and upcoming band but also create a presentation on how my group and I aim to market the band and distribute the music.

Korn Album featuring "Blind"

    My group of 4 had to develop a brand for a whole new band from the ground up. However, we were given a folder of 4 songs from a specific genre that we randomly picked. My group happened to receive the genre of heavy metal/nu-metal, featuring songs from Slipknot and Korn. After discussing which song would be best for each type of music video (story, promo, and artistic), we settled that from the options, Blind by Korn would be the best choice for a promo/story music video, and it would also be especially easy to edit to the beat. Even though we were using the song Blind, we still had to create a band around the song and disregard that the song already existed. 

    After deciding on the song, we had to make a research chart on different bands in the same genre from two different record companies. Using this research chart documenting different marketing and distribution strategies, we would be able to effectively assess which we would use for our own band in our marketing presentation. Our chart featured System of a Down and Payable on Death from Columbia Records and Avenged Sevenfold and Disturbed from Warner Records. 

    Once completing our research chart, we began storyboarding our music video and deciding when and where we would record. This was one of the more difficult parts of the project since we had to decide what our brand and public perception would be since it would decide how our music video should go. Many ideas were thrown around, from clowns to crazy blind people, but we eventually settled that a promo of the band would be most optimal for us. To make the promo video interesting and fit our theme and image, we decided that we should all wear prison and psych ward outfits to convey the idea that we are crazy, uncontrollable, and rebellious, all aspects that fit with the sound of nu-metal. 

Frame from Music Video

    The initial idea was to have all 3 of the band members wearing prison outfits, but unfortunately, we could not get all of them on time for the scheduled time we set to record. So instead we improvised and had me, the main singer, differentiate and have a ripped-up outfit with a muzzle over my mouth. This not only served as my costume and fit with the theme of prisoners but also served as a way to partly cover my mouth when I was singing to make editing and syncing easier later. On the day that we had to shoot, our team member who was meant to be behind the camera and film us had something come up and couldn't come, which caused a lot of problems during filming.

    On the day of the shoot for the music video, with only 3 team members, we did the best we could to make the most of our surroundings. When the shot would have to include all 3 of the band members, we would have to prop the phones up to desks or doors to get medium and wide shots of all of us performing for the promo. This lessened the variety of shots we could get of all 3, which is unfortunate since a promo music video should have a wide variety of shots. However, we used close-ups and mediums to our advantage so that only having one or two members in a frame would make sense in the context of the space.

    As we were storyboarding and organizing the music video, we were also working on our marketing presentation, making a list of all the major points we wanted to hit and what we wanted to include. We used the information from the research chart to influence our choices as well as keeping in mind that our band was a new one that would be limited in its resources and power. In our presentation, we had to include information like the genre overview, our brand, image, target audience, etc. to fully market the band. On top of this information, we decided to take a step further and make a website where the band would post information such as shows, upcoming music, and merch.

    In terms of editing, I took the main load. Editing to the beat proved to be harder than I thought it would've been, especially with some stylistic choices I made such as having multiple videos in one frame. Finding clips also started becoming a hassle the more I edited because I realized that we had not filmed as much as I had hoped which led to me struggling in some areas of the music video to find an appropriate clip that hadn't already been used. After making the main line edit, I chose to stylize the video quite a bit since the basic edit turned out relatively bland and boring, which is the opposite of what I wanted with a music video and song like this. I started to mess with the color of the clips and the layering of multiple clips as well. In the end, I was pretty happy with the end product. 

    Overall, this project taught me to utilize my time a lot more wisely, as I found myself scrambling to record the music video with only a few days left before the due date. I also learned to always prepare for the worst, as my group was not ready for our cameraman to be absent from recording, forcing us to cut down on a lot of ideas and visions we had. I think for my Cambridge portfolio, taught me that I must dedicate my own time to working on these projects and not just rely on my time in class.