When starting out with a project in the music industry, but especially in the diverse environment that is today’s music, it’s seemed increasingly important to be wide-ranging with your ideas to how any particular artist’s music might be used.
Ideas in books like “Tribes” by Seth Godin and the work of Nettwerk Music Group’s Terry McBride have been major influences in my thinking on how to approach the marketing and tribe building of El Corazon. To that end, I decided to use an approach that was outlined by Terry in a September 2009 report commissioned by Music Tank – and one that has since been implemented with one of Nettwerks’ artists, James Yuill.
As a starting point, I compiled answers, purely for my own information, to the questions below to better understand the context in which the music and the artist would stand upon release:
1. Who and what is the artist?
2. Who is their aligned tribe?
3. What does that tribe do from the moment
they wake up, until they go to bed?
4. Where does that tribe hang out physically
and virtually?
5. What other artists are resonating with this artist’s tribe?
6. Why do other artists resonate with this tribe?
7. What other brands are aligned with this tribe?
8. What other media types are aligned with this tribe?
9. What are the tribes’ causes?
10. How does this tribe differ from country to country on these same attributes?
(Source: Music Tank)
Approaches will differ from artist to artist, but the focus here is identifying the community around which and within which the artist could potentially grow, and visualizing aspects of how artist and music can creatively interact with that community.
What approaches are you using for understanding and building a fanbase and what successes are you seeing? What do you think the potential pitfalls would be using the above approach?
