3 Reasons Why Musicians Would Be Perfect Marketing Directors
Why the idea of musicians directing marketing campaigns should not seem creepy, but feasible.
I would like to start a conversation here. Let’s start by taking an outside-looking-in approach and swallowing a reality pill:
Marketing and commercial music are structured in a similar way.
Here’s why:
1. Marketing Tactics / Melodies
The structured sound of instruments creates melodies that drill our ears and stay in our heads — so do marketing tactics, such as mottos, scenarios and characters: they are what we remember from a specific campaign. They also show up in layers; one marketing tactic by itself cannot bear fruit, but when combined, they manage to communicate the right message to the right people.
2. Marketing Vision / Composition
When composing a song, which is a well-designed sequence of sounds, we tend to combine layers of melodies, beats and ambient sounds. However, the composer doesn’t have to necessarily be the performer. In a similar way, the creators of a marketing campaign’s vision don’t have to execute the campaign themselves (or ‘play the instruments’); they can envision the layers, structure and goals (‘compose the song’), and then distance themselves from the execution (‘music performance’). The musician as a maestro of marketing — doesn’t sound that bad.
3. Marketing Strategy / Production
A marketing strategy gives meaning to the elements of a campaign (‘melodies’) , by placing them in context and defining their importance/priority. Isn’t this what music production is all about? Not only that, but these elements can also be adjusted in an agile way during real-life execution, just like live sound engineering does! No melody sounds good without the fine tuning of a producer and live sound engineer — to me, this sounds like what marketing strategists do.
Songs and marketing campaigns, from idea to execution, could be the beautiful brainchildren of a single person. You could be the composer — producer — performer. However, in order for songs/campaigns to appear live on the stage (…of a venue or life), more often than not we need the contribution of a team of people, whose aim is to synchronise their actions and make the separate elements ‘make sense’ in a sequence, when consumed by a specific audience.
Digital software or services can be used to cue and automate such actions. This would allow us to get rid of the aforementioned team. Yet, the manual human touch will always have the ability to make the final result more authentic and ‘warmer’.
That makes me wonder: why don’t we see more musicians masterminding/executing marketing campaigns, since it’s a similar process with delivering a song?
Let’s scratch the surface. In my opinion, the answer to this ‘why’ is simple: because they lack confidence to undertake such tasks.
Why do they lack confidence? Allow me dig one level deeper and answer: because they don’t have the knowledge and holistic view of music entrepreneurship.
Confidence comes by owning the knowledge of the tasks which demand it.
Musicians surely understand the gravity of practicing their craft. They see it as a habit they can’t live without. Likewise, they could sharpen their understanding of entrepreneurship and make it a part of their daily routine. Music and entrepreneurship are not as far away as one might think — both frameworks are inextricably connected.
Times demand — more than ever — musicians who have an overview of the digital world and can strategically operate within it.
Currently we’re awash with musicians who claim ‘they’re only here to make music’. Nothing wrong with that. On the same time, though, the very same musos complain that ‘digital services don’t pay enough for them to sustain a living’.
Ask yourself: would you trust the future of music to this kind of musos?
And with that in mind, I’m turning to you. Let me know what you think!
Tommy Darker is the writing alter ego of an imaginative independent musician and thinker about the future of the music industry. His vision is to simplify scalable concepts and make them work for independent musicians.
He is the firestarter of the movement of the #Musicpreneur, an academic lecturer, and the founder of Darker Music Talks, a global series of discussions between experts and musicians. He and his work have been featured in Berklee Online, TEDx, Berlin Music Week, ReThink Music, Midem Academy, SAE Institute, Hypebot and Topspin Media.
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