Build Your Artist Brand
Week 1 of our January Branding Challenge
It’s 2025. Welcome to the future. Let’s get your artist brand in order.
But first, some news.
DYL2M Private Group
The amazing private group I lead, where women and queers meet weekly on my live calls/share work daily on discord has moved to a new location!
If you want to get the most out of this branding challenge and dial in your artist brand once and for all, this is how you can get hands-on branding work and feedback with me.
I’m accepting applications now, but space is limited, so I’ll likely be closing them soon.
Here is a beautiful testimonial I got recently from one of our group members:
If you’re ready to get serious about making the best, most life-changing music of your life and sharing it with others in a way that can change their lives and yours in the process, then you need to join DYL2M. It is a safe space for everyone, but especially for queer, non-binary/trans weirdos like me. And if you’re none of those things, you’re welcome too! It’s literally a space for anyone to find the support, community, and encouragement that you need to become the best, most creative, most authentic version of yourself that you can be! And to share your work, your passion, your life without fear! But you better be ready to do the work because everyone in the community is going to hold you accountable and encourage the shit out of you to be more you than you’ve ever been. Why are you still reading this? Hit that join button. Go. Now! See you inside!
-Chris Hugh, Nashville TN
Here’s the link where you can learn about how our private group is run and to fill out the application to join:
I’m also rolling out a new tier where for just $5/month you can get access to the weekly coursework exercises where I teach you step-by-step how to implement the ideas I discuss in my weekly posts.
As you know, January is all about branding, but each month we’ll be tackle one of the 7 Essential Skills required for music career success.
Paid members will also get access to the archive of past courses so you can master each and every essential aspect of your music career.
January Branding Challenge
Why are we calling it a challenge?
Because branding can be challenging to wrap our heads around.
It can be hard to know which aspects of our complex, squishy, changing, subtle, sublime, ugly human selves to put out front for everyone to see.
All of them? None of them? Just the pretty ones?
A depiction of ourselves that’s more acceptable than who we really are?
Interestingly, no. None of these.
In this branding challenge, our job is to express one thing.
Simply, the truth.
Ok, I lied, it’s actually two things.
Simplicity, AND the truth.
Let’s break this goal down a bit so we really understand what we’re looking at:
The Truth
Many things are true for us. Our lives are complicated.
When I talk about The Truth TM, what I mean is the creative true north of our music.
If you were with us last month for the Make Music Fans Fall In Love With course, congratulations, you’ve already identified the creative north of your music, simply refer back to your creative pillars. These are the elements of your artistic self and offerings that are unchanging. Your job as an artist is to deliver this truth into the world to nurture other people.
Some of your truths will be bigger/more prominent than others. Some of them will seemingly contradict each other.
Communicating the truth is about learning how to embody all of the most important parts of who you are as an artist, and make them work together.
Let’s take a look at how this can play out.
Beck is a great example of an artist who does this. Beck is both miserable and playful. He embodies his misery in his deadpan vocals and his sad lyrics. He embodies his playfulness in his cute hair and his silly, amazing sampling. He’s always Beck. He’s always funny, even when he’s not being funny. And he’s always miserable even when he’s singing about cheese whiz. His brand is that he’s brilliant and intense and lazily irreverent. It’s hard to find a single image of him where he doesn’t look both miserable and playful. A bleary-eyed gaze, a serious face, and an insane over-the-top cowboy suit. Even the album cover of Sea Change, his most miserable record, arguably the most miserable record, he’s photographed on the cover with a bunch of bright colors blobbed across his face.
Sometimes artists juggle a few different things. Many artists I work with have humor as an important element of who they are, myself included, which can be tricky. Here’s how I think about that for myself:
My creative pillars are:
Being extremely sad
The feeling of being cold/rainy/gloomy/almost cozy
Self-effacing absurdist humor
For me, it’s important that *for my artist brand* I use my humor sparingly, like salt, even though as a person, I joke around a lot. The thing is, my songs are all sad, some so much that it’s almost sort of funny.
It’s important for me to remember what people use sad music for. I use other people’s sad music (my favorite music) to feel normal and in my body, especially when I feel out of sorts.
I respect my listeners by being mindful not to let my humor distract from their experience of (hopefully) using my music to feel sad, in the good way.
But a little bit of well-placed silliness helps what I’m doing not come across too heavy-handed. The language I use when I’m writing in my artist voice (we’ll develop this in a coming week) is absurdly simple, to show that, while my songs are over the top sad (the chorus of an upcoming song literally repeats the phrase “love is a plague,” haha, oops) I don’t actually take myself that seriously.
So I like having slightly funny/messy/dirty elements woven throughout my brand. Art for a cassette that my son made me (for a steep $5) with the album title misspelled, for example. Releasing demo recordings as an album because I’m a goblin and I like for what I do to feel live and messy.
A Brand For A Band
Distilling and communicating your creative truth is essential and tricky, because we’re all complicated. It’s even trickier when you’re in a project with multiple people.
Here are some thoughts on that.
For the purpose of these examples, I’m going to use character archetypes in these descriptions, which you’ll learn to use in the exercise portion of this post.
If there is one main songwriter, the brand is going to probably be about that person and their story/songwriting perspective. Like how Michael Stipe embodies the Artist/Sage archetypes and that identity extends to the band as a whole.
If there are multiple front people, like The Beatles, both of them will have individual brand personas, but the group itself will have a singular one.
Paul, for example is the Everyman.
John is the Rebel.
Together, the Beatles brand primarily projects Everyman energy, (The Everyman is also known sometimes as The Orphan, interesting since both frontmen lost their mothers at a young age), but always through the lens of pushing on societal boundaries, in the spirit of The Rebel. I’d say Orphan sun, Rebel rising.
If it’s an instrumental band, the brand is about the energy of the music and where it comes from. The Bad Plus embodies archetypes like Explorer and Magician, taking familiar indie rock/pop songs and exploding them into jazz insanity.
If a band has many singers and no real front people, the brand of the group must be deeply unified in order to make sense. Take The B52’s for example. They embody The Jester as a group. I imagine that uniting a band around such a strong and consistent esthetic theme must have required a lot of vision and collaboration.
Simplicity
Simplicity doesn’t mean you can’t make deep, layered, rich art. It means that you need to be clear about what you’re offering and why it’s important.
What you’re offering. Why it’s important.
Here, I’ll do mine: I write sad, ordinary songs. I write them because people need sad, beautiful music when they’re sad so that they can feel connected and heal. That’s what I’m offering.
Next week we’ll dive into bio writing, where we’ll have some hands-on exercises where we’ll help piece together what is important information to share.
But for today, I want you to absorb the idea that every single thing you offer as an artist needs to be in service of what you’re doing and why it’s important.
Show, with every action, every picture, every caption, what you’re offering. In order to respect your fans, (current and future) show what you’re offering with an understanding of why it’s important to the person receiving it.
As we go through this process, I want you to run every single piece of content, every on-stage interaction, how you use your face in photos—EVERYTHING through this lens. If it’s not in alignment with what you’re offering and why it’s important, it is not consistent with your brand as an artist.
Clutter is the enemy of strong branding. Images, words, sounds that don’t support what you’re offering take away from the story you’re building of yourself as an artist, even if they’re good!
I’m not saying you need to make the same thing over and over again. Pushing the boundaries and making new things can be part of what you’re doing as long as it is in service of the truth you’re offering. If your archetype is the magician or the artist or the rebel, novelty will be a huge part of what you offer your fans.
But if you’re going to switch it up all the time, let that be part of your story, let it be something you do with intention and integrity. In order to have a consistent brand, you need to take responsibility for making sure there’s intention behind everything you show your audience.
Let’s Get To Work!
Below are this week’s exercises! Please drop your answers in the comments - I can’t wait to see what you all come up with!
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And if you want to go through this process with support from me and an awesome community of queers and femmes, you can do that by applying here. If accepted, your membership will include a paid subscription, so no need to do both.
And now, on to the branding exercises!