Behind the Scenes
As part of the Aice Media course, we were split into groups and assigned a music marketing project. Together we researched recording companies along with two case studies each of the artists that these companies produced. The work was distributed evenly between all four of us with each of us researching one artist. There were little to no challenges when it came to the research as each of us were able to find a surplus amount of information on our artists, which consisted of The Killers, Fall Out Boy (both part of Island Records), Arctic Monkeys, and Animal Collective (both part of Domino Recording Company). Researching these artist allowed us to gain a deeper understanding on how someone can market their products, in this case how these artists market their albums, for example, during the release of their album Mania in 2018, Fall Out Boy released their own sets of fidget spinners, a product popular to their target audience of 11-15 year olds at the time.
When we finished the research portion of the project our group began discussing techniques and ideas on how we’d market and film the music video of the song we chose “The Man”. One of the group members, Logan, brought up the idea of twisting the lyrics of the song into an empowering narrative where the main subject of the video is a woman dressed in more masculine clothes and breaking gender norms by being “The Man”. Though this was a great idea after talking it out with the group we came to the conclusion that it could be misconstrued as the opposite of empowering through the idea that women can only be powerful if they fit into more masculine roles which is nowhere near close to the message we originally wanted to send. After this we decided to take a different route and use the lyrics in a more literal sense. In these lyrics there are a lot of symbolism about The Man being a King and after a small joke about dressing up as a king for the music video we concluded that it would actually be a really fun and interesting idea. And so by sticking to this King theme, M’Lady was born.
After our main theme was settled the group began focusing more on the marketing side of the project. We began with the simple, such as creating a social media presence for M’Lady through Instagram, Twitter and Youtube. After this we created an original website where people can learn more about M’Lady such as their history, songs, music videos, upcoming tour dates, and lastly a gallery of M’Lady’s best moments. Two logos were also made with the theme of royalty, one being the official logo of M’Lady and the other we decided would go on a t-shirt, creating M’Lady’s first official merchandise. Lastly we discussed aspects of the music video itself, where we talked about different scenes and a storyline for the video. We plan on filming shots of our group member Logan dressed as a King and following him through ironic and funny tasks such as helping ducks cross the road and knighting a dog.
