Building A Brand For Your Music
Create your brand with a former music publicist's tried and true method.
This is me.
Why Am I so tired?
Because I spent a decade doing music publicity.
I don’t do that anymore, but I still love helping artists figure out how to level up. One of the first I learned when I became a music publicist is that all the promo, all the opportunities, all the shows in the world are wasted if you don’t have a strong artist brand. So very early on I started doing hands-on branding work with my clients. Below is the method I developed.
It will help you do two things:
Generate your brand
Embody your brand message
So let’s get into it.
What Is A Brand Even
In the most basic sense, it’s a product that has a name which distinguishes it from other similar products. ACDC is Australian screeching dad rock. Indigo Girls is beautiful introspective songs about being a Gen X lesbian. IHOP is a cozy place to have junky pancakes anywhere in the US.
What do the last three sentences have in common? They tell you what benefit you’ll get out of interacting with a given brand. This is more or less a value proposition.
Applying a marketing phrase like “value proposition” to your music probably feels a little weird, but stay with me.
In June, I was in New York City for a friend’s wedding. I flew out a couple of days early so I could have time to visit my grandparents. They’re at Beth David Cemetery on Long Island along with at least ten or twenty of my other relatives.
My grandma was the closest person to me for most of my life. She was pretty much my mom. I’d only been to her gravesite twice before. Once when I buried her in the summer of 2020 and once with my son last year, when we finally started traveling again. I had wanted to collapse on her grave when I took my son, but he was and still is pretty small, small enough that me wailing on my grandma’s grave would have definitely freaked him out. That visit has been nice but it was a little kid level visit to a cemetery.
This time, I rented a car and drove out of the city alone. I was already in tears pulling into the place. I needed to see her. But Beth David is vast and crowded. Like a horizontal tenement, I thought. I wove through the narrow lanes, frowning at a map print-out, second guessing which way’s what.
When I finally found our family plot, I flung my arms around her headstone and collapsed, sobbing. It’s been four years, but I miss her every single day. I can’t believe she’s not here to see my son grow up.
A delicate vine of ivy had made its way up the side of the stone. Any moment now the streetlamps will flicker on. Those are the words I picked for her headstone’s inscription. It’s the last line from one of her stories. It’s one about her mother and our family’s escape from Poland at the turn of the last century.
I sat there for hours, unraveling, talking to her and my grandpa. Asking for forgiveness, begging for guidance. It was heavily overcast and I knelt in the grass with the ants and weeds. The softest, sweetest rain began to fall on us and I started to come back together again. I could feel them no long here, no longer wrapped up in the shame and confusion of being alive. No longer tied up in the pain and conflicts of the living. I didn’t hear her say it, but the words came to me plainly: all is forgiven, all is well.
As I merged onto the Cross Island Pkwy, I felt landed in my body in a way that I hadn’t in years. I put on Built To Spill, Grandaddy, Eels… artists where there’s a profound acknowledgement of sadness, but the music itself is kind of resigned-happy. They offer a relaxed “life goes on” energy that welcomed me back into ordinary everyday life.
I used the work of those artists to immerse myself emotionally in a specific experience. The meaning of their sounds kept me company when I needed it. It’s actually kind of incredible how music can do that.
In that moment, I couldn’t turn to other favorites like Fiona Apple, Handsome Boy Modeling School, or Charlie Bliss. I reached for the brands I trust for “sad but warm, soft, ordinary, down to earth”. That’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about value proposition.
In this way, you’ve got to get clear on what you’re offering so that you can show up with actions, tone, colors and clothing that makes it easy for people to see what they’ll get out of investing their time and money in your music.
Understand the Assignment
Your artist brand happens at the intersection of who you are and what you do. As Seymour Stein wrote in his book Siren Song, tastemakers/talent scouts are hired by labels do a job called A&R, or Artists & Repertoire. Essentially that means songs and people. He basically writes that you’re not going to have a breakthrough artists without kickass songs AND a certain amount of presence from the artist as a person.
What I find is that delivering a clear artist presence is more about omitting some things than it is about becoming something more than you are. But how do you know what to show and what to not show? Great question, bestie. To get the answer, you must begin with the music.
Get In Yr Feelings
Pick your favorite 2-3 songs you’ve written in the last year. Ideally, they should be songs that reflect where you’re going as an artist, not where you’ve been.
When you’re doing this exercise, don’t select outlier songs. If you can, try to focus on the best songs that represent the majority of what you do.
Listen to these songs one by one and write down the following for each of them.
What feeling does the song give you? Try to be as literal as possible about this. What sensations do you feel in your body? For example, don’t be like “this song is sad”. Aim for something more like this:
This song makes me feel longing. I feel an aching when I hear it. It also feels cathartic, like release. OR I feel momentum, a feeling of urgency and breaking out. I feel brave and reckless and free.
What setting do you picture when you hear it? A city? Nature? What is the weather you picture when you hear this? What’s the season? What are the colors?
What other artists/songs that give you similar feelings in your body?
Here are some common challenges people encounter when doing this work:
Common Challenge 1: I’m not feeling anything!
If you had a hard time answering the first prompt, you might not be connected enough to the music you’re making. It might be worth investigating if you’re writing music that you feel deeply connected to or if maybe you’re writing to follow trends, an intellectual concept or something else.
If this is you, don’t worry! Check out my very first post to learn strategies for making music that you’re deeply connected to.
Common Challenge 2: I have too many aspects!
You’ve done this exercise and you’re like, but this song is happy and this one is sad and this one has sexy synths on it—how is this ever going to work?
Don’t worry. Billie Eilish is depressed and terrifying and sultry. You can be represented by more than one adjective.
Embodying your brand is about understanding the most prominent and representative elements of your constellation of attributes. It’s committing to showing them in a way that offers a framework of consistency for your fans. This is critical because when fans trust your artist brand, they’re much more willing to follow you down whatever creative path you take.
It’s sorta how if you like a restaurant, you’d be much more willing to let the chef make you something new and exciting from off the menu.
Common Challenge 3: My message is I’m just me!
Even no-brand artists like Pavement have brands. Their brand is that they’re aggressively regular white guys having funny existential crises and dry senses of humor. It’s a challenge to step outside of yourself, but let this marinate. Keep at it. There are things you are that differentiate you from other artists. And people won’t know that unless you commit to showing them.
So, now’s the fun part - let’s whip all these attributes into shape. And guess what. The shape is a pyramid.
Your Artist Pyramid
In Jamie Mustard’s exceptional book The Iconist, he discusses how people need to learn to trust a simple, repeated piece of information before they learn to trust a brand enough to want to receive additional, more complex information.
Take the Target logo. We see the red thing and we know it’s the symbol for bougie on the cheap lifestyle staples. Target shoppers recognize the logo when they see it and have a good sense of what kind of thing to expect. This makes it easy for Target ads to gas them up about any number of varied and complex messages, like make the holidays cozy or tidy up my dorm room.
The target logo is at the tip of the pyramid. It’s the simplest, most basic jumping off point.
If you’re envisioning a pyramid, imagine the top point facing your audience and the base of it facing you. The thing here is to pick one or two simple ideas to put at the very tip of the pyramid, facing your audience. This is the “get you in the ballpark” information.
Take an artist like Sylvan Esso, for example. Singer Amelia’s background is folk and she went on to form a rad, moody pop band with her partner Nick, which is excellent and probably sounds a lot like you’d think that would sound, given that information.
The main thing about Sylvan Esso is that they make tonally dark-leaning pop with a radically tender and starry-eyed point of view. This is the project’s true north. It’s the thing we first encounter.
Then there are the themes of the songs: elated joy, unflinching cynicism, self-reflection, desire. These are the secondary elements, say one level down on the pyramid where it gets wider. These are themes fans encounter once they’ve given a bit of attention to the project. Again, they know they’re here for radically tender pop, and they’ve gone deeper and can now appreciate the different emotional complexity of the project.
Then there are cool tertiary elements that form the base of the pyramid. Amelia’s big weird platform shoes, her adorable bowl cut and expressive dance style. The warm, childlike humor Nick and Amelia share on stage. Their gorgeous, orchestral in-studio performances. These things are the details that real fans have the pleasure of absorbing as they explore an artist in more depth. They’re all more complex pieces of information, but none of them are out of place under the umbrella of their thesis statement, which is dark-leaning pop with a radically tender and starry-eyed point of view.
Make Your Pyramid
Keep your paper handy and let’s make your pyramid.
What’s at the tip of your pyramid, facing the audience? Your genre and maybe general worldview. It’s the lens you invite your audience to peer through when they see the world through the eyes of your music. What are those elements?
What’s on the second level of your pyramid? What are the main themes that you talk about in your music that people can experience through your lens. This can and should be more complex than the tip of the pyramid.
What are some of the cool third level pieces you can include? Weird gear? Characters in your stories? Nature? City? Other visual or stylistic elements?
Damn, I can’t wait to hear about your pyramids. Drop those babies in the comments.
Get Uncomfortable
So now you know who you are and what you’re offering and it’s time for the scary part. Committing to the bit. This is the part where you have to get out your machete and start hacking away all the not-on-brand stuff. Why? Because it’s in the way and it’s making it hard for your fans to understand that you’re the band they should dedicate their life to following.
Your captions, your photos, your emails, your stage banter. Run all of that through the lens/message that makes up the tip of your pyramid. Does what you’re saying or showing enrich the story of who you are and what you’re doing or does it undermine it.
SO many artists post almost apologetic captions qualifying what they post rather than just being IN the ENERGY of whatever message or content they’re sharing. “I hope you like this” or “just a little demo I made” or whatever. How are fans supposed to trust you as an artist who makes excellent music when you deny them your authority in the art you yourself have made.
BTW I’ve been considering offering a service where I review and edit every piece of content a given artist makes throughout the month. The purpose would be to check it against their own artist brand to help train musicians to get in the practice of embodying their own message and authority. DM me if you’re interested in this.
Don’t Do Those Videos
You know the social media videos where you’re like POV you found a band that’s small enough to respond in the comments… yeah. Stop that. I’m serious don’t do it.
Let me be crystal clear on this point. Your story is not the story of whether or not you make it as an artist. That’s boring and nobody cares.
Your story, your brand, what you’re putting out into the world alongside your music needs to be about what you make. Good marketing is when you show up as a believable source for excellent music that will be there for listeners when they’re sitting in drive time traffic coming back from having cried in a cemetery.
Paid subscribers, on this week’s live Zoom I’ll be helping you all put into place the branding work I covered in this post! We have a couple of artists in our group who have been making incredible strides in this area and I can’t wait to see how they continue to evolve.
Unpaid subscribers, please consider joining our ranks - we have such amazing productive sessions. Our group is still pretty small so this is a great chance to get hands-on help from me with your branding and marketing or whatever else is on your mind!
Also shout out to the brilliant
who often hangs out with us too so you guys get help and feedback from two experts in cool glasses, not just one!As always, we’re meeting up Friday at 12 noon Pacific. I cannot wait to see you there!
I wish I were a band just so any of this advice were applicable to me.
"It’s time for the scary part. Committing to the bit." LOVE THIS SO MUCH.