MERAL ZAHID
SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARH (KINDA-)
Ahhh, the only thing slightly related to my science subject is ‘research’. I did some last-minute digging into what applications most users use to choose platforms to showcase and market our music video. This poll, which was open to users on Reddit, is skewed in favour of Reddit being the voters’ choice of platform. However, it is not entirely useless data collection as we can still use it to share our final music video for further reach.
'YouTube' is the definite winner, with all music videos being distributed by labels or indie artists available on there. Thus, it is the primary platform on which the music video will be released.
Internet browsers and Netflix are irrelevant to my research, so when disregarded, Instagram/Facebook takes the lead after Reddit. On these social media platforms, marketing is quite common. Instagram is the platform we chose for our marketing after deliberating between the two platforms. The ability to create a planned feed that a new audience can view allows them to get an overview of the artist's aesthetic and music style. For example, for a rock band, it is quite obvious that codes of heavy metal guitar, drums or electric neon colors for design are used.
WEBSITE DESIGN
Going back to the indie goddess, Mitski, for reference while creating our website, I added the basics of an artist's website. I visited a few other artists' websites, including Taylor Swift's and Olivia Rodrigo's, who, although aren't considered indie, still have an artist site with pretty much identical sections, which include merch/shop, recent MV's, Imagery on a main page connected to the album and finally join our newsletter at the very end so I also followed this format. Another common theme was following the branding of the released album to promote it, which is quite evident below precisely what I attempted to do as well.
The primary purpose of this website was to be linked to the Instagram page and under music videos to get traffic from these sources onto a platform where the audience can actually purchase artists' digipacks or merch.
Creating the merch: Everything is capitalist scheme
In order to engage with our audience and capitalise on our fandom to sustain our artist's creativity, me and noor divided the task of creating the merch so we could focus more on the quality of our designs. We felt the need to create merchandising to be featured on our website since it is common for indie artists to have their own merch in order to gain return on investment in the production of the current album release.
Once again, going back to Mitski's merch store for reference, there wasn't anything much that wasn't merchandise, from socks, and blankets to hoodies. Everything was available on there, so there wasn't much of a restriction of it being an indie artist's merch. However, we decided to break the conventions of putting up the artist's name on the product instead; we decided to highlight the album on merch without the artist's name instead, it is so that the audience can actually appreciate the design.
To create a mockup, I employed my non-existent Photoshop skills in warping the overlayed images on the bottle to give the illusion of a more accurate mockup. Lowering the transparency and changing the blend mode to darken helped in creating a sticker-like effect. I chose to add frames from the mixed media effect so that the merch is coherent with the theme of the album and more personalised with artwork from the MV.
For the tote bag, I placed the image from the album cover along with the text 'The silence that binds us', but at Noor's suggestion, I removed it so it looks cleaner and the album cover image is visible.
Lastly, for the hat, it was reasonably straightforward. I used the album font, overlayed it, and changed the base colour of the hat to match our brand colour shade of red.
All Mockup PSD designs that I have used were available on mockups-design.com.
Following the brand kit and the final digipack created by Noor and constantly texting the team for approval and suggestions, this is the final merch I made. However, this is only half of it, as the work was divided between me and Noor
YOUTUBE: SHOWCASING TO THE WORLD
The process is quite complicated after trying to embed the YouTube channel here, so this image must suffice. Well, TA-DA, our artist, now has an official YouTube channel. It was pretty easy to set up another Gmail account, which I created for this purpose. For the channel banner, I used a banner guide to create the design on Canva. I used this Greek artwork paired with the repetitive imagery of entwined hands as its background while experimenting with the image highlights and vibrance to make the artwork more visible. Over it, I overlayed the album text and added a red border to it, just like the text on our site with a border, so really trying to tie in all elements.
We recieved a few comments from the viewers which was mostly appreciation.
INSTAGRAM: LET US SHINE
We planned our social media posts using Google Docs and decided to use a more creative and fun way to present our artists. We devised this plan after going through tons of artist's social media pages. This was the overview of how we wanted to structure the page, slowly building anticipation till the music video release along with the album release. After covid-19, many artists are going on tour, so it would only be right that our artist does so too.
The Instagram design came under Noor's domain, and the teaser under Zahra's; I will link their blog posts below. However, I contributed slightly to the designs.
I absolutely loved their vision for the design, though we were conflicted between two separate designs in which one was made by Noor and another by Zahra; I simply helped them merge it to create the Divine Realm coming soon banner posts. Also, the use of the crooked kingdom book graphics for the tracklist was an absolute genius move by Noor, working as a marketing tactic to attract Grisha-Verse fans. Targeting more of the reading community who, like us, might share such similar interests.
Though individually both designs are visually appealing, I merged them to create the ultimate design that we ended up using with slight tweaking.
Here's a mediocre attempt at creating a meme.
The Instagram page was dry, and there were no stories to interact with our audience, so I took on the responsibility of designing and posting the stories. In total, each story reflects the phases of marketing: phase 1: pre-release, phase 2: Day of release, and phase 3: post-release. In phase 1, we excite our audience with something new coming up in the story, giving a glimpse of a frame from our MV, much less than an entire teaser post, yet still get the conversation amongst the fans about what the artist is up to. Then, we move on to phase 2: stream the album's Instagram story and reshare actual listeners' Instagram stories after calling them out to share it while reposting our tracklist post. Lastly, phase 3 leads to something similar to an X (formerly Twitter) watch party, a listening party. Initially, I thought of creating a discord for our indie artists. I then thought against it since it would just be community-based, which is a pro and a con. X would work better to increase reach beyond the community as the interactivity of the existing community would increase reach to a broader audience.
Here is a look into the audience's response to our divine realm teaser posted on our Instagram.
Use the -> button to get to the next slide.
Zahra Aslaam
INSTAGRAM: PLANNING
//This post was allocated to Noor and Zahra, however due to them not being able to comply to the deadline, I have written a filler post.
Greek artwork played a highly influential role on us during our Instagram feed's creation because it is a part of our artist identity, with his name originating from the name of the ancient Greek goddess Artemis, twin sister of Apollo and goodness of chastity, hunting, and the moon. With Noor working on her Canva skills to make the banner post, we created custom artwork on my friend's iPad separately to have a range of artworks to choose from since we all had differing opinion on how the centrepiece artwork for the coming soon post should look like.
We ended up going with Zahra's design on the right since it captured the abstractness of the entire album to follow and was not an overly simplistic digital remake of existing artwork like mine on the left, which I did not get time to finish.
We hopped on a call and further discussed our ideas. From this point onwards in planning, I was the critic and not the creator since this was a task allocated to my teammates while I simultaneously worked on our final Music video.
We used Pinterest as a source of inspiration. I have attached two of the pins Noor had saved on the board, which show the influence of having the design flow beyond one post and instead span three (AKA banner post). This concluded the planning of our social media and then was in hand of noor for production.