Chapter 2: Branding + The Artist Compass

(🚨DISCLAIMER: If you missed my announcement, this is Chapter 2 of a new ~40-50 part series that will teach you literally everything I know about marketing, audience building, monetization, and how to do it all without feeling “gross”. If you missed Chapter 1, you can read that by clicking here.

Every week I will walk you through one key concept in our MAD Records marketing methodology and provide real, actionable steps to apply it to your music career... and each newsletter will build off the previous week until you have a complete and holistic picture of our unique methodology that we’ve used to build and develop our artists’ careers at MAD Records.)

I hope you’re settling into your virtual dorm rooms nicely and that you’re all getting alone with your roommates.

To answer your question - YES I will be continuing this classroom analogy for as long as I find it funny…

…..so frankly this might be the last time.

If you missed orientation last week for this series, you can get caught up by clicking here.

But for the rest of you WE MOVE FORWARD!

Before we can build a marketing strategy and a brand for your music career, we need to understand what a brand actually is - and how it’s changed over the years.

Nowadays, with the help of the internet and social media, anyone can launch a brand. But if we rewind the clock just 20 years, the barriers to entry for launching a brand in any industry were much, much higher. Marketing channels were typically gate kept or extremely expensive… you couldn’t simply launch a Meta ad campaign for whatever product you wanted.

You needed to hire graphic designers and marketing strategists, run focus groups, buy marketing real estate in magazines or billboards, and coordinate a complex, expensive, and long-winded campaign before actually “launching” the brand. This old-school approach likely cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is why it was imperative that it was successful as quickly as possible.

….. that era is over.

Nowadays, with the tools available to artists and entrepreneurs, you can launch your brand instantly for a couple bucks. You can pay someone on Fiverr a couple bucks for a logo, register a domain, start a couple social media channels, and away you go.

But this begs the question, if anyone can launch a brand… then can anyone really launch a brand.

So we need to get clear on what a brand actually is.