This article was written in response after reading a post by Joseph Becker, Esq.entitled "For success, is the business plan more important than the music?" Here, not only I respond to the post, but I even add my insights based on my 6 years (3 years of design + 3 years of marketing) of experience being a marketer, a musician and a designer myself.
Here goes the article:
Designers speak their artistic lingo.
Marketers speak their marketing lingo.
Musicians speak their musical lingo.
What makes a successful artwork or music or a business as a whole?
It is definitely by finding that point of balance between creating a good artwork, a good music to merge with the marketing/business plan that will generate a symbiosis connection between the three.
For example, I've been running successful Facebook posts for a client of mine where the post engagement rate over a period of 2 months was almost 4,000 conversations across the social media. But before that can happen, I did quarrel with the creative team (I used to be a designer myself, but due to my tendency towards marketing, I am now a passionate marketer).
The argument:
The creatives: I don't like the idea of having CTA texts on the picture as it will only make the posts ugly.
Me: But pictures without CTA will not be successful as there won't be any CTA at all from the public.
Now, I understand where the creatives are coming from - where they are talking in their artistic lingo - they are more concerned about the typography, the 2:8 text-picture ratio, the resolution of the picture used and so on. So a picture that has CTA texts will only make the picture seems 'crowded' and it will reduce the artistic branding.
Unfortunately, being a designer who has transformed myself into a marketer after a few years doing door-to-door sales, telemarketing, SMS marketing, eDM and doing MLM, I found to realize that that was not the case at all. A successful design is not because it is just beautiful, but it must be commercial on the same time. The CTA text is important as the customers won't know the meaning of the design or what do they have to do with the design upon seeing it. So what's the point of having an artwork if it's not meaningful enough to get customer-conversion in return?
The same case if it was to be a music - a successful music must not only be artistic, but it must also be commercial on the same time. An abstract artwork/music will only be understandable by the niche, but in order to approach the mass market, designers/musicians must think in the perspective of an entrepreneur/marketer. The crafting of the music/artwork must comply with the idea of stuffs that sell.
As a musician myself, I tend to ask my band to be creative but also on the same time, commercial as well. What are commercial musics? Definitely, pop, of course. Because the structure of the song would be the usual verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. And if you realized almost all the songs on the Billboard Top 100, they are basically using this same format for all their songs - no matter what genre they are; rock, country, nu-metal, hip-hop and many others.
Why the verse-chorus-verse format? By far, this has been the most acceptable music format that will make song more organized and more memorable in the ears of the listeners. Instead of ramming through the solos, the riffs, the drums, the synthesizer too much until it's 5 minutes long, bear in mind that the songs will only be appreciated by the substream niche instead of the mainstream niche. Creative is good. If a band should publish an album, their songs must be well-balanced of what should be in the mainstream and what should be in the substream.
The substream is mostly the fanbase - the ones who appreciate the creativity of the band and would love to hear all those 5-minutes long of the crunching of the guitars, synthesizers, keyboards and many others. But remember this. Fanbase will never be as much as the mass market out there. If the mass market is 2 billion on the planet, your fan base may be up to 10-20% out of that number. As a musician, you still need that money for your wife, your kids, your parents and yourself! To survive. That is why the best way to make it work out there is to have something like a 4 mainstream:6 substream ratio for an album compilation.
So that the mainstream songs can be playable as singles on the radio - reaching that mass market to reach that targeted fanbase or niche you want to buy the whole album to hear the creativity of the band as a whole.
Now, this is also the same case for creating artworks. That is why in my definition, there are 2 types of artworks:
a) The abstract artwork - the artwork that mainly focuses on artistic value as a whole. the type that may not get the interest of the mass market - but it will certainly be ideal to the lovers of art and creativity
b) The commercial artwork - the artwork that has that point of balance between keeping the artistic value as meaningful so that to get the message across the targeted audience in which in return, it will bring commercial value (the ones that lead to sales generation)
In case you think I'm not walking the talk, you can search 'Nic M Rayce' on Google to find out more about my musics and my artworks. I wouldn't want to give you the link here myself as I'm not trying to convey a message as if I'm promoting my music/designs. But if you seek proof, Google can be your friend. :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment