Create A Visual Identity For Your Music
Week 3 of our January Branding Challenge
Hey Friends,
Welcome to week three of our January Branding Challenge! If you want to revamp your brand, it’s not too late to join the fun! Sign up for just $5/month and I’ll get you set up with all the coursework and videos from the previous weeks.
Expressing your music visually can feel like an impossible task, especially for the many of us who are auditory learners.
And yet, a visual identity is what carries a brand and makes it accessible. Whether you like it or not, your visual assets are the first way most new potential fans perceive you.
Needless to say, building a visual brand that boldly expresses the true north of your artist brand is mission critical.
A Competent Brand: The Ultimate Dead End
As with many aspects of branding, most artists try to develop their visual identity with the goal of creating a competent, believable brand. They build a visual identity that *looks like* what they think an artist should look like.
If you’ve participated in local music scenes, you’ve no doubt seen bands where their image is especially dialed. They have the pro gear and the consistent outfits and their music sounds ready-for-a-kia-commercial pro.
These bands suck.
They’re joyless and bad.
They have the same energy that makes people cringe at Imagine Dragons (a band I’ll defend to the death, btw). They’re imitating an existing style, which by definition means they’re on the late end of a trend, which makes everything they do feel like a caricature of itself.
These bands might be easy to plug into a festival opening up for other similarly-dressed bands, but they’ll never have a meaningful career of their own because what they’re doing is too stale to inspire real fandom.
I won’t belabor this point further because I know you get the point. Your visual identity shouldn’t come from what you see other artists doing.
Project Your True North
If you’ve been following along with the January Branding Challenge, it’ll come as no surprise that your visual brand needs to be absolutely bursting with your artist archetype energy and the energy of your creative pillars.
This week I’ve got a killer exercise for you that will allow you to start building your visual brand, beginning with a DYI artist photo challenge.
If you’d like to follow along and get weekly music career development exercises, please consider joining DYL2M for just $5/month.
If you’re looking for more hands-on guidance, consider joining my private group of queer and femme musicians. For just $30/month you’ll join in on our weekly live calls and get expert support daily in our private discord as we go through our monthly career development workshops. Our no-commitment membership is the fastest way to supercharge your music career and to dedicate your life to music.