As a professional musician, you are an entrepreneur. Your music is a product that you probably want to sell in a competing market. Therefore, to sell your products and have a successful career in the music industry, you should treat your music like a business and create your unique brand.
In this article, we talk about music brand development and how to build your brand as a sound artist.
What Is Branding For Musicians?
In general, branding is what helps people identify a particular company, product, or individual. For a musician, a brand is what reflects their overall message, identity, personality, style, values, beliefs, ambitions, and music.
A brand presents your music to the world through a unique experience that your fans can resonate with.
Benefits Of Branding In The Music Industry
It Creates a fanbase.
Although the quality of your work is what fans ultimately look for, you are not visible to them without a persona. Good branding with a unique persona is what makes you stand out from the countless other artists trying to get their music heard.
A professional musician should save no effort in creating a loyal fan base because it is a key to making a consistent income. Similarly, a strong, authentic, and consistent brand is crucial for building a fanbase. Without it, your chances of building business relationships in the music industry diminish drastically.
It allows you to communicate through a new dimension.
In the music industry, we focus on expressing our thoughts and feelings sonically. Through music branding, sound artists have an opportunity to express themselves and their creativity visually as well as sonically.
However, it is necessary to realize that a brand is not only your visual identity and its elements, such as your logo and theme colors. Your brand also guides your marketing and messaging strategies and affects the way you present yourself in person and online, and much more. In a nutshell, your brand reflects your story as much as your music.
How To Create Your Brand As A Musician?
1) If lost, ask yourself some questions.
To build a brand, you need to learn as much as you can about yourself. If you feel such a task is overwhelming and you are not sure where to start, the best way to go is asking quality questions such as:
- Why Are you creating music?
- What sets you apart from other musicians?
- What genres do you belong to?
- What is your style?
- What inspires you?
2) Use your answers to identify a unique selling point.
Design your questions in a way that leads you to identify the qualities that make you different from every other artist. Those qualities are going to be the foundation of your brand.
Ideally, your brand should revolve around something that your fans can only experience with you.
3) Find inspiration from your favorite musicians.
Sometimes you cannot figure it all by yourself. Even with top-quality questions and the best answers you can find for them, figuring out your brand without a source of inspiration could be difficult. In this case, you can go to your music library and find the artists who inspire you and study their brands.
If you relate to those artists, try to describe them in a word or two and use those words as a starting point for building your brand.
Another source of inspiration can be your target audience. Find the people who resonate with your music and try to understand them.
Tip: Some online tools can help in finding, sorting, and analyzing such data. For example, the SoundCloud Stats feature can find the locations of your listeners. Additionally, Pinterest is a perfect tool for creating digital boards to pin your references and research.
4) Create your message
After understanding yourself and the music you make, It is time to create a brand message. When doing so, bear in mind that a successful brand doesn’t only communicate what an artist does but also why they are doing it.
For example, many artists, especially from the 60s and the 70s, created their music to support humanitarian causes. By advocating for something they believed in, these artists helped grow both awareness for the issues and the size of their fanbase.
Associating your music with something you believe in will help you connect with your fans and develop your brand to a new level.
5) Develop your image
Your image plays an integral part in how your fans are going to perceive you. Therefore, developing your brand involves figuring out what kind of image your want to portray to the world.
In addition to the visual elements of your online and offline marketing collateral, your brand image as a musician also includes the way you dress, how you present yourself in interviews, and how you interact with fans and the general public.
Your acts, what you say, and how you say it should be congruent with your brand message and music. In this case, people who meet you or listen to your interview will feel the same vibes they feel listening to your music.
Tip: Consider consulting with your stylist to create a look that suits your brand message and type of music.
6) Be authentic
Branding is all about authenticity. Your brand is nothing more than who you are and what you stand for. There is nothing wrong with being inspired by other musicians or being influenced by a mentor or a role model. But it is imperative to ensure that your brand represents you genuinely.
7) Be Consistent
Consistency is another requirement for a powerful brand. Being consistent helps your fans to identify you from the first glance. Moreover, it ensures that they have the same experience every time they interact with your brand.
For a consistent brand, your visual identity should be the same across all platforms and marketing material. Furthermore, you need to maintain the same brand message. Otherwise, people will have a hard time remembering your brand.
Conclusion
Your brand compliments your music. It introduces you to your fans and shows them what to expect from your records and live shows. Although it needs a lot of attention, your brand will evolve over the year as you become more successful.
Are you a musician who wants his work to stand out? Reach out to Mello Studio, and we will help you make your mark in the music industry.
