Create Your Artist Brand Voice
Week 4 of the January Branding Challenge
Hi Friends,
This is week four of our January Branding Challenge! If you haven’t been following along, it’s not too late to join! Start here with Week One and always feel free to reach out if you get lost! It’s not you, Substack’s mobile app makes it hard to organize/find articles.
Many of the artists I’ve worked with over the years have struggled to establish a consistent artist brand voice. In this post, you’ll learn how to create and commit to your artist brand voice so that your pure creative message shines through to attract the right fans into the world of your music.
What’s A Brand Voice?
Your Brand Voice is consistent style of language you use verbally and in writing when you’re representing your music publicly. A brand voice is the lens through which your audience will get to know you and eventually welcome your artist persona into their cannon of musicians they love and identify with.
Consistency is comforting to all of us, and using a way of speaking that feels deeply aligned with the art you’re presenting helps people relax and become easily immersed in your music, if it’s the right music for them.
What’s Stopping Us?
Women and queers especially tend to try to soften the blow of whatever message they’re sharing via their email newsletters, social media posts, even in their on stage banter between songs.
Softening the blow is when an artist feels unsure of themselves and tends to basically neuter their energy and message in order to appear more approachable, appropriate, non-threatening.
(Note. Can you imagine having a transcendent experience watching music because the artist is approachable and appropriate and non-threatening? Just wondering.)
Softening the blow is anything you do to break the tension you feel when you show up to do your job, which is to offer connection and meaning to your fans.
Softening the blow can look a few different ways. Permission seeking is one. Minimizing is another. Lots of artists use a tired, lukewarm humor to break the fourth wall, while others push past their discomfort by overcompensating with bravado.
Here’s the thing. Humor, valor, sensitivity—nothing is wrong with projecting these aspects of yourself, and they can be excellent energies to embody so long as they’re used with intentionality and aligned deeply with your specific art and artist persona.
Softening the blow may feel selfless, like you don’t take yourself too seriously, but it’s actually selfish because the only real benefit of this kind of behavior and language is to protect your own ego from the inherent risk (see: judgement, rejection) associated with believing in yourself and your message as an artist.
But softening the blow robs fans of receiving the message and value of your art by interrupting their “user experience” with out-of-place messaging that does nothing but telegraph your own discomfort.
You Don’t Have To Be Self-Confident
You may believe that you have to muster a lot of self-confidence in order to step into your truest, biggest artist persona, but nothing could be further from the truth.
When I became a publicist, I was sure that the job had a lot to do with wheelin’ and dealin’, but the thing that ultimately (after some years of trial and error) made me really good at my job was being organized, consistent, and understanding the job really well. More important than being a cool guy hot shot was keeping track of the different coverage formats of each publication, the editors posting timelines, and the different tastes and interests of prominent writers.
Having a really consistent artist brand is kind of like that. It can be a big challenge feeling brave enough to show up in full alignment with the message of your art, but once you understand your artist archetype and message and you feel really clear and settled with it and the energy you’re serving, it’s kinda just plugging pieces in.
Don’t have your artist archetype and message locked in? Start the January Branding Challenge here.
Having a consistent brand is almost kind of boring in this way. You just show up and give what you have to give over and over again in a way that people can recognize and count on. It’s a lot like being a good friend. You don’t even really have to be extraordinary to deliver something really, really valuable.
Get Ready - Let’s Build Your Brand Voice!
As always, our weekly coursework is available below for paid subscribers!
If you’d like to join my live calls and receive hands-on support the from me and an incredible group of women and queers, please consider joining the DYL2M Private group for just $30/month, no commitment. It’s been incredible watching the artists in our group absolutely blossom over the last month going through these exercises.
And it’s not too late to develop your artist brand with us this January! Here’s a sweet message I got from a brand new member who joined yesterday!
“Tysm for this! I’m devouring it already - it’s everything I need right now! thank you for offering this.”
-Elly, Brooklyn NY