Creating your brand will shape your image as a musician. You have to look within yourself to find a meaning for what your marketing – yourself. You can use branding yourself to find ways of making yourself relevant to the people you want to love you, and to reveal what makes you unique amongst everyone else.
And then you have to communicate that meaning to others. It becomes your trade mark.
It’s more than just creating a name for yourself, the name you want people to call you, or having a short brainstorming session on how you’ll create an online Youtube campaign showcasing your talent.
You’re an artist and want to create art.
Right?
In making your brand you are making an extension of your art that will represent you visually and in print.
Think about how you want the media to perceive you, and how to protect the image of yourself that you want the world to believe about you. Don’t forget to write that out too.
Determine how you’ll keep your power in order to stay the artist you want to be. How to keep from getting misrepresented by your promoter, your manager, your label.
You have to do this so that, whatever art you release visually or as audio, it represents the best of you, it has integrity, and it will earn you respect among other artists, the public, and amongst your fans.
When you create something distinct and unique, and you record it for the world to experience, it’ll be real easy to know whose taken your ideas without giving you credit – to you, and everyone else.
And by creating your brand you will have formed an image of yourself that you’ll promote on your mixed tapes, the music you release online for free download, the music you sell through iTunes, and Google music, the channel you create on Youtube, and the blog and website you’ll launch for exposure as you work to build your fan base.
As you write out your brand and visually design it, begin to and continue to read as much as you can about the music industry and famous musicians. You’ll learn about what worked best, and what flopped. And get ideas on when to take risks. Read everything you can get your hands on to learn about industry history, contemporary news and stories, current trends in music, fashion and style. Look back at the past and into the future.
