My Experience Making a Music Marketing Campaign

I created a music marketing campaign for an artist named alex! and his new single “Carry On” I learned many new things about the music industry, things that are popular practices as well as less common but effective practices.

Our ultimate goal in this campaign was to promote heavily through social media, specifically Instagram. We decided to distribute on all digital platforms, however, we focused mainly on Spotify due to its various convenient tools for promotion and huge audience. To connect with our audience as personally as possible, we set up several pop-up shows to which fans can attend and experience alex! in person. A long-term goal of ours is to get alex! to big TV shows such as The Late Late Show, The Tonight Show, and Ellen. These shows would gain alex! lots of exposure and would help to promote any future songs. We filmed a music video that would give our audience a visual which would help in getting fans to know the artist.

We researched top artists Camila Cabello and Beyonce in order to further understand the music business and the most effective modes of promotion and distribution. From this research, we discovered many practices that we will be implementing into alex!’s campaign. For one, the hottest month to release music is January, this is due to streaming services renewing their subscriptions in that month. This is where we realized how effective these TV shows are in promoting music.

We filmed and edited the music video for alex!. This video would be used as a promotional tool to give fans a visual of the artist and really help them to get to know him quicker. We decided to include many slow-motion shots as we believed it matched the mood of the song as well as scenes in the rain where the artist gave an emotional performance that went with the song. The video can be viewed on Youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkAwSQpH_i8

One of our main focuses was on Instagram, the biggest social media in the United States. We focused on this social media specifically because of its growing audience, and because our target age range is very active on this social media making up 61% of the total users.

On Instagram, we mainly focused on creating a professional looking profile for alex! This mainly consisted of good quality pictures, quick links in the highlights section, and a good looking profile picture. However, there are many other things that we used to promote the page. Interacting with other artists was a prominent one, we would interact with artists that were alex!’s size so that they would promote each other's work. We would also comment and be active on bigger artists pages as they have more traffic. We made sure to use engaging captions for the pictures that were posted, this way the fans would interact on the posts and become active fans. Finally, we made sure to repost any fan’s stories listening to alex!’s single “Carry On” to give the impression that many people were listening to the song, this would entice new fans to listen to the song.

We also took other social media into consideration depending on the size of the audience and their target age range. For example, we also promoted “Carry On” on Snapchat because their users are the same age as our target age. We paid for filters promoting “Carry On” that would be placed in hot locations such as Miami or New York. When it comes to streaming platforms, we concentrated on Spotify because of its user-friendliness and tools that it offers artists for promotion. We submitted the song to be considered for playlists, this way the song would gain more exposure.

The music business is a complicated one, the industry has changed drastically with the introduction of streaming platforms such as Apple Music and Spotify. We believe that this plan takes advantage of all the new technology and trends that have emerged lately, and that this plan will be effective in boosting alex!’s fandom.

This activity has expanded my knowledge about the music industry, specifically distribution and promotion. The knowledge I have gained will definitely be put to use in any future activities and could definitely come in handy in real life situations now that social media is the best promotional tool for any media, not just music.