Music Marketing Project Blog Post #2

 This project has truly been a rollercoaster. It was quite challenging, and me and our group tried to collaborate as best as we could to get satisfactory results. We were given a genre to work with, and four song choices. We had to do a research chart, storyboard, music video, PowerPoint and even social media accounts. 

  It all started with the research chart. We had to choose two music video companies, present information about them, along with examples of artists featured and two case studies of selected artists for each. We had chosen at that point in time that we would do Columbia Records and Republic Records. For Columbia Records, we discussed on Beyoncé's and Harry Styles' career choices to amplify marketing and consumption. For Republic Records, we wrote about Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande. This assignment was extremely important for the foundation of our new persona, because it listed ideas for marketing and distribution techniques that ended up inspiring us. 

   We then had to create our artist, in another words, our whole brand. We had to introduce them as someone new to the industry, and, as assigned to us, work around the pop genre. Our pop song choice from the four options was the song "She Will Be Loved" by Maroon 5. We analized the story that was being told in the lyrics, and began thinking of what type of person would sing it. We had decided that Jax Dailey would be the name of this new star, he would be kind and passionate, and overall a very generous and innocent person. In this music video, he would be telling the viewers about a past experience he had with an ex girlfriend.

   The storyboard was quite hard to make. We had to make a great video, but try to follow social distancing guidelines as much as possible. This obviously would make things way more challenging, and even sacrifice potential ideas and quality. The original music video by Maroon 5 was about a guy that was friends with a girl that kept going on and off of toxic relationships. He would always accommodate her and help her, but what she didn't know was that he liked her. We decided to change the perspective of the song's narrator to instead be an insane, intense ex girlfriend. This was a creative choice and gave the song a fresh start. Ella was the one who insisted on making a storyboard as she got inspired by our idea. She thought of shots that would help create the feeling of a certain scene while she was socially distanced to the actors.

    The music video was filmed afterwards, and it included all of us; Mel (me), Larissa and David- but Ella, because she agreed to be the cameraman. I would be the ex girlfriend; Larissa was the new girlfriend, and David was the boyfriend. We headed to a setting that was accessible and potentially fitting for the aesthetic on the story. We even thought of color psychology in our outfits, for example, having me wear three different outfits; a black one to show sketchiness, a red one for anger, and a green one for envy. On vista park we filmed lots of scenes of actors angry in their cars, couples and even David getting out of a workout. We tried to make the scenes look their best, even though being far from one another could harm the camera's quality.

  After the music video was filmed, we had to edit it. David was in charge of that since the rest of us weren't exactly the best at this. On one of our meetings during class, he shared his screen so that we could see what was happening and what he was doing. It was nice for him to share it because we could get to see "behind the scenes". I also learned a little bit from what he was doing.

  For the PowerPoint, we decided to include social media for the artist, along with a logo and some merchandise. I took care of this part. I thought of a logo that reflected on "Jax Dailey" 's persona. I did a heart with some hand extending towards each other. I went on a business website to make actual merchandise drafts of hoodies, bucket hats and even stickers and phone cases of that logo (something fun about it is that we can order one of these products as a memory of our project). For the social media, I used Instagram, since its the most popular. I created an actual account with actual posts, but I had to photoshop the followers and likes. I thought that since the artist was new, he shouldn't have too many followers right away. I gave him 256 thousand followers, which is a standard number for smaller, indie artists. We talked about the whole project on the PowerPoint as well, and embedded the video.

   The presentation is something I can't comment too much on, because unfortunately I had a doctor's appointment at the time. However, I was first assigned to do slides 4-6, talking about the community, Instagram, and marketing on the artist's posts. 

    In this project, I learned a lot about brainstorming and creating new ideas. I understood how group collaboration works and how organization is extremely helpful. I did a lot of effort, which also taught me that these types of projects are never easy and that I should always work hard to become fully proud and satisfied with my work. I think the lessons I have learned will affect the next projects I do, and this will affect my Cambridge Portfolio for the better. Although it was a very hard and stressful journey, I am now better at this than before, so I 100% think it was worth it.