Does your band have valuable promotional items?
Or does your band have any promotional items at all?
Artists need to ask themselves the questions:
As far as the public is concerned, who am I as an artist? What do I want people to think of me as and perceive me as?
And then…
Do my marketing materials really reflect this perception? Will they form it, or create an opposing perception?
These important questions are what my good friend and colleague NDK Creative Artist’s latest article over at the Free Articulator discusses.
“Marketing is first and foremost a Perception-thing; it’s about image in the PR sense,” he opens with. He then follows with a crash course on how to use promotional items to form a certain perception. It’s a good article, and an important one, to all artists worldwide.
You can read this piece after you click here.
What does promotional items mean when it comes to a band?
- Album art
- Posters
- Web design and graphics
- Downloads - wallpapers, instant messenger avatars
- Paramusical items - think the Gorillaz
- Merchandise, and even…
- You and your band members
Remember that no matter who you have designing promotional items for your band, you’ll need the copyrights to those items when they’re done. Of course, you’ll need to negotiate some terms and conditions; they’ll want attribution and perhaps a payment of royalties from the sales of merchandise and other material that their work is sold on. You’ll want the copyrights in their entirety, as well as the master files (Photoshop PSD files for instance) so the work can be adapted for a variety of uses.
Forget this last step, and watch the wolves tear you apart as soon as you start seeing success.
Tags: marketing, musician’s marketing, promotion, promotional items, band marketing, copyright, intellectual property
November 6th, 2007 at 10:47 am
[...] It’s important for musicians to pay attention to each and every detail when working on their promotional materials and mechanisms. Even more important than the content of a purchase confirmation message are the [...]