Did you see that recent Sonic The Hedgehog movie trailer?  Video game fans thought that the look of Sonic wasn’t quite right and there was an online backlash to the extent that the director of the film took to social media to acknowledge these concerns.   He valued the input of the fans vowing to tweak the look of Sonic before the film’s release.

That’s certainly a bold (and expensive) move but it shows a respect for the views of the audience who are the ones who will be expected to pay to view the end results.  This got me thinking as to how often to we as musicians seek the input from our audience. We as ‘makers’ quite often fail to seek the views of the people who buy our end product, the ‘customers’.

There are plenty of ways we can do this.  Could your audience have an input on the cover design for your next single? The colour of your next t-shirt? Could they decide which singles make the album? Which songs should you play in your set this weekend?

The delicate matter of course is that we’re not just making ‘entertainment’ here, a lot of musicians would argue they are also creating art and as the ‘artist’ they should have sole creative input. Sadly, there are no hard and fast answers here.

One final note, if you are asking for input from your audience and getting little in thw way of response you probably need to put more work into your audience engagement. Keep working on building those all important relationships.

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

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