Marketing in the Music World
- Vera Klap
- Oct 23, 2020
- 4 min read
Social media is an incredibly powerful platform nowadays for people to communicate with each other but also for artists to communicate with their fans. Social media can be used e.g. for creating an immersive marketing campaign to announce new music or to build a relationship with the fans which indirectly already markets their music. There is so much information and marketing thrown at us during the day that creating a memorable marketing campaign and a relationship with the fans is very important for your message to stick to the consumer.
Immersive Marketing for Artists
Perhaps one of the smartest ways to promote music for artists is to use immersive marketing. Immersive marketing uses the experience as a central point. The consumer will be submerged in a made up story by you. Nowadays consumers want more when buying a product and want to explore and be a part of the product. This brings so many opportunities for artists to explore since music is already a very powerful tool by itself. Combining music with immersive marketing will be unstoppable.
A great example of an immersive, well rounded and still on-going marketing campaign is “Eroda” by Harry Styles. This campaign focuses on an imaginary island “Eroda” which is first introduced to us by the @visiteroda Twitter account. The account started tweeting about the island randomly on the 21st of November 2019. One tweet stating “The Isle of Eroda’s rich history is embedded in daily life as the ruins of many structures from the past remain standing across the land. #VisitEroda”. After posting some more cryptic tweets the website visiteroda.com emerged which basically acts as a travel guide for a regular city. The Attractions of the island as well as accommodation can be found there. When Harry Styles released the music video for his hit song “Adore You” on the 1st of January 2020 he made the island reality. In the music video Harry Styles can be seen on the island and visiting the places mentioned on the website. This really created an immersive experience for the fans and the twitter account of Eroda was also very actively interacting with fans. Now the website of Eroda has added a new attraction called “The Lighthouse” and hinted at watching a “Golden” sunset which fans speculate will be the next single of his last album “Fine Line”.
Artist-Fan Relationships
It has been known for quite some time that building a customer relationship is very important. By building a relationship with your customer, you create sales. Without even mentioning the product your sales will go up due to the trust you build with your customer. This is also the case for artists. Without fans the music will barely have any streams and no copies, whether digital or physical, will be sold. Therefore building a relationship with your fans and maintaining said relationship with your fans is one of the most important points in the marketing campaign. However, this relationship should be maintained all year round, not only when new music is being released.
One of the best fan-relation marketing strategies I found can be seen in K-pop. K-pop stands for Korean pop, thus pop music sung in Korean. There are loads of artists, mainly girl and boy groups, who want to rise to the top and therefore having a solid fanbase is very important. Perhaps one of the most famous K-pop groups is BTS, a 7-member boy group from Bighit Entertainment. Their latest music video for the single “Dynamite” gained 101.1 million views within 24 hours breaking the Youtube record for the fastest viral music video. Their fanbase is called A.R.M.Y., and can be seen as quite literally an army who defend their artists and help them break records after records.
But how do they maintain this relationship?
Members individually tweet from the bands Twitter account @BTS_twt whenever they perform somewhere or just want to share something with the fans. BTS also makes use of the platform called “Weverse”. This platform is basically the same as Twitter where the fans can interact with BTS and BTS can create posts to share a moment of their day, it is used by many other K-pop artists as well. Another platform that makes the relationship a bit more personal is V-Live. On V-Live artists can live stream with live comments and talk to their fans. Live concerts are sometimes given on this platform. Lastly we have Youtube of course. Besides posting music videos, BTS also posts behind the scenes of exciting experiences they had called “Bangtan Bombs”. These show a more personal side to BTS which creates a more personal relationship with the fans.
When BTS announced the pre-order for the new album “BE” coming in November, fans did not hesitate to pre-order it even though there are no pictures showing what the album is going to look like and neither a snippet or a single for the album has been released. This just shows how powerful and important a relationship with fans is for an artist.
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