This week I have begun production on my music marketing project. The project would have my group and I create a brand for an up-and-coming music artist through the advertising and shooting of their first music video. The artist we were assigned to "rebrand" was Busta Rhymes, and the song of his we would have to make a music video for is Dangerous. In our first week, my group and I have done extensive research on marketing strategies employed by artists similar to the personality we would be advertising and we've also planned out our entire music video, from the way it would look to the way it would be edited.
In our marketing research, we looked at the success of artists signed to two immensely popular record labels in the hip-hop genre, those two labels being Cactus Jack Records and Top Dawg Entertainment. We found that artists who are extremely vocal with their fanbase and keep them updated on the music they are making, artists like SZA, are popular with the younger demographics and create a strong bond between them and their fans. We also found in our research that artists who choose to stay radio silent until they feel it is time to release new music(after having created a reputation in the music industry, of course,) like Kendrick Lamar and sometimes Travis Scott, almost seem to be worshipped as dedicated musical geniuses to their older demographics. Both methods of fan interaction have the same effect on artists' ability to sell their music.
After having researched artists in the genre, we moved on to brainstorming the elements of our music video and how they could reflect on the branding of the artist. We decided we would take a promotional/storytelling route in our music video, having a narrative about a troublemaker committing various criminal acts to prove he is "dangerous," and every so often during this narrative, the video would cut to our rapper, now named "The Vanquisher," singing a few lyrics. We poured all of our ideas into a shared document, as pictured below.
Once we determined exactly what we wanted the narrative to be, we storyboarded the entire music video and even got to work on filming it at school during class. The only shots we filmed were the ones of the Vanquisher rapping to the camera, and I took on the role of the Vanquisher. Busta Rhymes is extremely talented at rapping quickly, so it was a bit hard for my mouth to keep up with lip-syncing the lyrics at times, but from what we filmed, it looks promising. My outfit was supposed to mimic the 90's rapper/gangster look, and I feel like I pulled it off, but I'll let you be the judge of that.
