Music Marketing Blog Post #1

    The brainstorming/planning of my music marketing project went relatively well with minor problems. On the first day, we received the mixed folder that included several genres so we had more options than most groups, and we quickly narrowed our options down to "Me and Your Mama" by Childish Gambino. We listened to all 4 songs and MaYM stuck out to us the most, but the lyrics were a problem. It starts off with "I'm in love when we are smokin' that la-la-la-la-la," which seemed a bit inappropriate for school, but after some discussion we flipped it and decided to make the song about drug awareness rather than promotion. We also decided to do a band rather than a single person because we thought it would be easier to promote. With this, "Wake Up" bloomed. We want our group to be about raising awareness about taboo topics in society, with our first project being about drug addiction, so we chose Wake Up to represent what we want to do. We want to wake up society to all the problems going on and how to work through them. We also decided on what to do for the music video: a story of a girl getting high and having a horrible experience but in the end she goes back for more. We decided to not end the story on a light note because we want to show the harsh reality that people relapse even after a horrible trip because they’re so addicted.

    On the second day, we worked on the marketing research. We hit a snag again because our genre is Hip-Hop Funk, so it was hard to find companies and artists that fit such a specific genre. After brainstorming for a couple of minutes, Hannah suggested that we work backwards and see what company Childish Gambino is signed to and find artists through there. We found that he is signed to RCA Records and used to be signed to Shady Records, so we decided on those and looked at artists similar to him. However, this still proved quite difficult as once again, the genre is so specific. The 4 of us worked together to find Alicia Keys, Nao, Eminem, and Westside Boogie and begin our research on them individually.

We spent the rest of the class doing so and before class ended we exchanged numbers and made a group chat to be able to communicate. We also decided that Andrea would be making the social medias and I would be making the website, because we each know how to do so. Additionally, we decided on the song title “Chasing the Next High.”

    On the third day, we went over our storyboard and began our presentation with a Canva template. Hannah and Sabrina began uploading the information we already had onto the powerpoint. In the meantime, I made the website and Andrea worked on the social media profiles. We all decided to make our color scheme blue and purple so I added those colors to the website.

While making it, I asked my group if they liked the way it looked and what I should add or change. When Hannah and Sabrina finished what we had, Hannah began to work on the social media posts themselves and Sabrina began working on the merch. We discussed what the merch should be and say but we hit another snag because we originally wanted to make a shirt saying “are u chasing the next high?” but we realized it was encouraging smoking rather than preventing it so we decided to throw out that idea and use the logo. At the end of class we discussed when we would be filming and decided that I would work on the editing since I have experience.