In our last blog post we looked at why branding is important for marketing your music career.  If you missed it, click here.  Today we’re going to look at how you can use visuals to help create that brand. The visuals and the imagery that you use for your music marketing is incredibly important.  You can regard these visuals as your ‘packaging’.  All of the elements below will incrementally contribute to help you build that brand.

Your Logo

Your logo is perhaps the most important visual aspect of any band or artist.  Never underestimate the power of a good logo and if you have a good one it can last a lifetime.  Through merchandise you can also make you a lot of money!

A good band logo is worth its weight in gold. You need a good one.

A logo is something that represents you, it’s a signifier for your music and your values. Get a designer to create a good one which and use it on EVERYTHING.

Are there specific design tropes that you have to adhere to for your genre of music? Metal bands for example have their own way of doing things.

Metal bands have their own design tropes for logos. If your genre has too, make sure you adhere to them.

Photography

A picture speaks a thousand words and how you come across in your photography will say a lot about you.  How you stand, the looks that you give, the colours in the lighting or the digital proessing, your shooting location…all these send signifiers to an audience.  Using these is a great way of ‘getting the message across’ about who you are.

This classic NME cover tells you everything you need to know about the brother Gallagher.

Ultimately, your photography should ‘sell and tell’ who you are.  Having instruments in shot in band photographs may seem cliched however they are there to give ‘signs’ to an audience so they don’t have to think too much.  Here’s a publicity photo for the folk group Show of Hands.

We can see their instruments and there is a natural, nice organic setting . Here’s a publicity image for DJ Fresh

He is stood in a futuristic neon space with his turntable controller.  In summary, people don’t like confusion when confronted with visuals.  Use clarity in your images to say exactly who you are.  Don’t be afraid to help ‘tell’ the audience what you do and what you sound like.

Clothing

The clothing that you wear in your publicity photo shoots and the clothing you wear when performing is important,  Certain genres of music have design tropes which tell people ‘this is the type of music I make’. Do you conform to these?
As we’ve discussed before in this blog, if you’re in a cool rock band, should you be wearing a striped t-shirt?

Have you noticed how similar sounding bands look and dress in a similar way.

When Coldplay released their Mylo Xyloto album their clothing and their stage production matched their album imagery.  They ‘became’ the music.

During their Mylo Xyloto tour, Coldplay’s clothing reflected their album artwork and stage design.

Take Away Tips

• Ensure you have a strong band logo.
• Make sure your promotional and external imagery tells people who you are and what music you make.

Next time we’ll look at how your ‘personality’ can help create your brand.

Got any questions about this post or how you can better market yourself?

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