The music marketing project is one that I was pretty excited for. I love music and I love music videos, and a music video is a major component of the project. The other major component is creating a marketing plan for a fictious band that is meant to be promoted through the video. The project began when our group got randomly assigned got a genre to work with, ours being heavy rock. This excited me because it's a genre that I really enjoy. We then received the songs we would have to choose from when it came to what song to use for the video. Although it wasn't my first choice, the song we choose was Duality by Slipknot. It wasn't my favorite out of the available songs, but looking back it was probably the best choice. It has a rhythm which is really good for fast paced editing, which is good for music videos.
The next step was research. Our group had to create a document of research for two record companies and two bands/artists signed to each, these bands having to fall under the genre we were basing our project on. The subjects of our research also had to have released new music in the last five years. We started on deciding on two artists first, then picking two more based on their record labels. The first band we choose was Korn, because they've been a major influence in the metal scene since their inception. I also decided that we should also use Rob Zombie, mainly because I'm a big fan of his work, and also because heavy rock tends to be dominated by bands, so I wanted to mix in a solo artist. We divided the research among ourselves and got to work, mainly focusing on our subjects' use of marketing tactics, especially the incorporation of social media and the internet.
Once the research was done, it was time to plan the presentation and video. To do that we had to decide who our artist would be. Early on we decided that it would be one singular person as opposed to a full band. This would make it easier on us, as we only had to promote one individual and only needed one person to play said individual in the video and in photos (that person being me). Given that this was a new artist we would be promoting, we decided that our target audience should be young adults and that social media would be very important to our marketing. We then came up with the idea of our artist being someone playing a character. We talked about how there wouldn't be a consistent band playing at every show, which led one of our group members to parallel that to the idea of a spider that regenerates its limbs. This led us to our character concept: an alien spider that uses the power of music to assimilate people into its colony in a sort of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" scenario. We started planning our video around showcasing this concept, with a group of teenagers coming across the alien entity. In a word document, we planned out the plot and began to highlight and annotate the lyrics. Things were going good, until I really started to think about what our plan was. It was clear to me that we were trying to bite off more than we could chew when it came to our video's concept, and we had to scale back. The rest of the group agreed. The video's plot changed to being themed around alien abduction and experimentation with a more vague and implied plot, and our artist (who still lacked a name) would be simply preform as themself, although the alien bug motif remained. I made a storyboard based on our new direction, and soon enough it was time to film and create our marketing presentation.
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| A page from our planning. Many of these ideas were kept while others were discarded. |
