Music Blog Post

 Marketing Project 

For the past month, my partner Isabella Gonzalez and I worked together to develop our new artist, Hardin and prepare him for his up coming debut single; "Steps". With our genre being alternative rock, every decision we made as far as marketing goes, we made sure it tailored to our target audience which was male and females in between the ages of 16-25. We supported this with research that we found explaining that 72% of the people that listen to alternative rock where in between the ages of 14-25 years old. 

                            For our marketing we took inspiration and tips from the very famous alternative rock bands; Coldplay and Radiohead. Through them we found out that exposure and fan interaction is most important for this type of genre. For example, to promote their up and coming album in 2012, Coldplay organized an international scavenger hunt for their fans to find lyrics to every song on the album which led to the release of their album. For our marketing campaign, we decided to take inspiration from that idea, but make it our own. We planned to print out Hardin's official logo and wrap downtown Los Angeles -which is where Hardin is based- with it. Behind the flyer would be a discount code which would allow anyone  to receive one item of Hardin's merchandise free of charge. Our thought process behind this was to maximize exposure as much as possible and with this idea alone we are getting all different types of exposure simply by printing Hardin's logo. Downtown Los Angeles is one of the busiest places all around the world, every type of person that you could think of is walking around downtown L.A, so if people see the same flyer over and over again, around every street corner, on every post light, and on every window, they will get curious and try to find out what it is. Secondly, the fact the we are giving them free merchandise will not only serve as a way for new fans to be created and people, to look the artist up and see what the deal is, but it also allows us to advertise in other places around the world without having to spend a lot of money. If people start wearing Hardin's merchandise all over the pace, not only will other people repeatedly see the merchandise over and over, but it will allow people to get "hooked" and want to listen to Hardin's new music and start to build that relationship with the artist that we are striving for. Another marketing campaign that we would use is the use of Instagram and Snapchat filters. Instagram and Snapchat are two of the biggest social media platforms currently out, so this is a perfect fit for our target audience.

                 

                  

As Mentioned above we did decide to release merchandise that includes clothing with Hardin's logo or the name of his debut single 'Steps, as well as tangible merchandise like the vinyl that plays Hardin's single. The reasons as to why we chose to do this is really very simple, it works. With bands such as Coldplay and Radiohead, we found that their merchandise is a good way for them to make money and promote themselves as they do. The designs that we created, we also felt as though they were very in-tune with what are target audience might want t buy and wear as other alternative rock bands also had similar layouts for their merchandise with either the logo or name of the single/album. 

To conclude, I would definitely have to say that what I learnt the most, which coincidentally was were I felt we struggled the most, was how to stay or keep within our genre. At times it would get difficult to stay within the lines of our genre and we felt as though we were representing aspects of the pop genre rather than our genre which was alternative rock. To fix this we made sure to research specific characteristics and representation aspects of our genre.