Music Marketing #2

 Planning

After we got our group together, we knew it was essential to lay out a plan for when we wanted parts of our project to be done. So as our first step, we created a calendar to set up dates to record and practice our presentation. We discussed which dates would work for everyone within the group and assigned a day to finish our research.   

We also thought about who we wanted our artist to be. We decided on a darker topic, drug addiction, and recovery since our selected song, Time is Running Out by Muse, spoke about addiction within its lyrics. We also decided to make our artist a recovered addict, so that this music video would make sense.

Research

We knew in our research we would have to find two different record labels. To do this, we split our group of four into two groups of two. Each person would focus on a specific band from their respective record label within these groups. My partner and I researched different labels and tried to pick one with a variety of artists, especially artists in our genre (electronic rock). The label my partner and I chose was the Radio Corporation of America, RCA for short. When narrowing it down to specific artists, we looked at artists that made music within our genre. I chose the band Cage the Elephant and my partner chose the band The Strokes.

After choosing my band, the research began. I first went to all of the bands' social media, as I was most interested in how they marketed themselves to their target audience, which I discovered was young adults. I added all of the information I found on the band to a chart we had made where each group member added what they found, this way we could all learn about different information from each band. I specifically found that Cage the Elephant gained a lot of fan interaction using their social media by reposting content that used their music. I pitched this idea to my group, and they thought it would be good to include it within our marketing strategies for our group.

Production

We filmed our entire project in one day as we did not have another opportunity to do so. With the generous help from some friends who were willing to be in front of the camera, we were able to film the entire video in about 8 hours. 

Filming the video was a long process, but very rewarding and fun. With the addition of some candy and popcorn chicken, filming was a process filled with smiles and laughter. However, we knew the topic of our video was going to be a serious one, as our entire project was based on addiction and recovery. The video itself was a darker tone about overdosing and choosing drugs over the people who are trying to help. Our two main actors did a fantastic job of portraying their specific roles as the addict and the loved one who is trying to help. We also used a lot of different lighting to help set the tone for different scenes. In the end, we were happy with the footage we were able to record.

Post-Production

Although I wasn't the one to specifically edit the video, everyone in the group saw the video in its raw stages and tried to help bring it along with different ideas and suggestions for how the video should look. In class and over the phone we would talk and text each other ideas that we had about how to fill black spots, how the lighting should be changed, etc. After the footage was done being edited, we decided that we wanted an animated title to close our video. So one of the group members, who knew how to use AfterEffects, gave us different fonts and layouts to choose from and we all settled on one. This was the effect seen at the end of our music video.

Presentation

For our presentation, we created our slides using the website, Canva. From here, we each individually decided which slides we wanted to present and created them together on FaceTime. Although sometimes the internet was spotty, we got our presentation done and developed each of our notecards on what we were going to say when we presented. We FaceTimed a couple more times and ran-through our presentation a few times and made some minor adjustments to our presentation.

On presentation day, we had originally planned to pass out candy to the class but decided against it at the last minute. When we got up in front of the entire class, the rest of my group did pretty well in presenting what we had practiced throughout the week. However, for some reason, I became extremely nervous when I stood up in front of the class and began to stutter badly. It's a shame because I feel that I let my group down, and I didn't perform as well as I had when we were practicing. Regardless, the rest of my group did a nice job and I feel that, even though it was hard, I learned about my stage fright and that I need to practice even more to fix it. I enjoyed creating this project, it was a lot of fun and a learning experience for my group and me.