Researching Music Marketing Campaigns

I have researched a variety of marketing campaigns promoting musicians ranging from 2016 to the present. Over that period, the move to online media has accelerated to the detriment of physical and broadcast media. Marketing campaigns promoting musicians have reflected this.

I have mainly focused on campaigns since 2019, as TikTok became the most popular online video sharing platform in that year and has since had a huge impact on the consumption of digital video, with other platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Facebook launching their own imitations of TikTok’s short content, fast delivery formula. This has had a knock-on effect to the music industry, as this trend heavily encourages the use of a soundtrack over vidoes, which has resulted in songs gaining a lot of exposure when used as soundtracks over viral videos. I have made some exceptions for older campaigns promoting artists of genres that I am drawing from, as they offer specific insight into reaching my desired audience. I have also decided to discount campaigns from 2020.

Marketing campaigns from 2020, the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, were anomalous for the following reasons:

1. The swift change in lifestyle resulted in marketing campaigns not using well-informed or tested methods to reach audiences.

2. Physical mediums were devalued and deliberately overlooked.

3. Audiences’ engagement was warped unpredictably.

4. Uncertainty called into question the achievability of many marketing campaigns’ goals.

5. The media and lifestyle climate before and after is not comparable to that of 2020.

The immediacy of the changes that occurred in 2020 resulted in flawed marketing tactics, and even successful marketing campaigns were successful in a different situation than the current. Therefore, inferences from marketing campaigns from 2020 are not relevant to today’s climate, and will only serve to confuse the decision making for my project. I have included campaigns from 2021, as the problems from 2020 had in part receded and, specifically, more certain predictions about audience engagement could be made.

That being said, there is one music campaign from 2020 I must acknoledge for shaping the direction of my research: Travis Scott’s virtual gig in the popular online game Fortnite.

This event utilised the digital space to create a dynamic, psychedelic show. In the preceding days players could see the stage being constructed in-game, attracting Fortnite players who weren’t necessarily fans of Travis Scott. Ultimately, the event was virtually attended by 27.7 million people. For perspective, the most attended in-person concert had a crowd of an estimated 4.2 million. Would this virtual event have been so highly attended if it wasn't during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic? I suspect not. Nevertheless, this heavily influenced my research by prompting me to seek out uniquely creative musical campaigns, rather than simply just successful ones.

A great resource I found for my research was Music Ally. Music Ally is a music industry consultancy. They annually publish a list of the top marketing campaigns of the year, which goes in depth on the targets, strategies and successes of each campaign. I looked at the top campaigns from 2019 and 2021, picking out my favourites.

An initial takeaway from conducting this research is that I need to define exactly who I want to reach; Who is my audience? The key demographics that are commonly identified across all the campaigns that I’ve looked at are the age range, gender composition and location of the target audience. These are highly dependant on the genre of music that is being marketed.

This made it clear that I need to concisely define the musical aesthetic that I am aiming to create, so that I can focus on the marketing campaigns that are most relevant to my project.