Marketing Music - Part One

Hello to my blog readers! 

As a girl who grew up in a very musical family, (my dad’s side being almost entirely musicians) I’ve always loved being exposed to so many different genres and styles of music. I believe that it is an art form, with every artist having their own personal tastes. That being said, I was thrilled when we started our first case studies last week, which were focused on researching different recording companies and picking two of their most notable artists. 

In groups of five, we had to pick a music genre at random and lucky enough, my group chose rock. We then discussed some major record labels and selected one each individually. Domino Recording Company was my choice, so I searched for two of their most popular signed artists within the rock genre. Additionally, I searched for some brief background information to get an idea of the company’s identity. Essentially, they were founded in 1993 by Laurence Bell and are based in the UK.

For my case studies, the first band I chose was Arctic Monkeys (I had heard of their music before as my dad listens to them a lot). I love the band’s approach to branding and identity, as they tend to develop new styles with every new album. I feel that that this is not only a great way to keep original fans hooked, but also to appeal to newer, younger audiences through their recent themes of nightlife and being misunderstood. Similarly, I was surprised to discover that the Arctic Monkeys were one of the first bands to take advantage of online platforms such as Myspace and SoundCloud to grow their following in early years. In fact, they were pretty instrumental in this sense. Today, they have a massive worldwide following and multiple award-winning albums. It seems to me that their significant popularity can be attributed to their unique marketing methods, which recently include lots of cross-media convergence (such as concerts, social media, and merchandise) as well as technological convergence (through their website which includes links to their music videos, online store, and ticket site). 

If you’re interested in listening to some nice tunes, here is one of my favorite songs by Arctic Monkeys, “Snap Out Of It”, which has an extremely popular music video with over 110 million views on YouTube (a successful marketing tool to promote the band and song) 

The second band however, Franz Ferdinand, I had never heard of, so I needed to do lots of searching to familiarize myself with their audience (which I found to be primarily people aged 30+) as well as their intended identity (tending to be modern and artistic, with lots of visuals incorporating graphic design). I am truly very grateful for having taken my time to study this band, as it has become my favorite recently. I find them to be super original and intentional, not to mention their incredible work. On the marketing side,  the band uses lots of engaging social media posts to gather followers. Across their platforms, they commonly interact with fans and have taken up a “for the people” identity, seeming ordinary despite their fame. Similar to Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand uses both cross-media and technological convergence to promote themselves. Their website serves as their main online hub, providing fans with lots of exclusive content and giving them the opportunity to “stay in the loop” by signing up for their newsletter. As for cross-media convergence, the band has made many appearances in rock magazines, taken part in music festivals, and produced several bright music videos that contrast from typical dark rock trends.

My favorite song I discovered from the band is “Take Me Out”, which I linked below. (Warning! You may find yourself humming this track for days!)

On a more recent note, the second part of my music marketing project is a lot more hands-on. Just yesterday, (11/19/25), my class was tasked with creating a new band identity and using methods we learned, promote their debut to the world. Amongst these methods, we must create a music video for a song. Out of four songs my group could choose from, we picked “Something from Nothing” by Foo Fighters. Since we’re still in early stages of the project, we have yet to choose a name for our band, but we’re have a couple of ideas (“Elm Street”, “Max Volume”, and “Future Paradise” being some). 

Here’s the audio if you’ve never heard the song we chose: 

In class, we learned about the three most popular music video styles (promotional, storytelling, and artistic). To create one for our selected song, my group is between creating a promotional video and a storytelling video. I think either would be fitting, but I have a ton of music equipment we could use to make an amazing promotional video (electric guitars, amplifiers, and a great setup) that creates a garage band look and a youthful, unhinged rock style. The hard part of the project however, is finding a way to create an NEW identity, without copying that of the band that owns the song. To avoid being influenced by their style, we have refrained from watching any music videos from the Foo Fighters. 

Taking inspiration from our case studies research, some other tools my group is considering to develop our band identity are social media pages (to appeal to teen audiences), creating a website to tie together our digital media, designing merchandise that symbolizes and reflects the band’s personality, and shooting a “magazine cover” for Rolling Stone that would establish the band as one to look out for, or rising stars. 

Overall, I am super excited to start working on this project and I’ll make sure to post an update soon! For now, keep calm and rock on!