Over the years being able to promote yourself as an artist and getting yourself known has become essential to "bringing in the big bucks" and becoming a successful artist. In earlier times promoting yourself would have been much harder than recent years, lack of technology for communications and travel would have made it very difficult and the basic, posters, ads in newspapers and on radio stations to promote the artist would have been the biggest and best ways of making yourself a household name. There was also a lack of ways to play your music to the public, records and the radio being some of the earliest forms of playing music which then over the years evolved, tapes and Cd's and television came around with the likes of Top of the pops which was the sole channel for music on TVs starting in 1964 and was in episodes on a weekly format. Finally evolving into the wonderful yet controversial music industry of today, with hundreds of channels dedicated to non-stop music and hundreds of social media sites capable of promoting and connecting the artist with today's world.
A&R's
In today's world we have A&R's, artist and repitoire, personnel that are at a record label with the task of finding new talent and developing them to their best standard. These people will start off at gigs and listening to unsigned artists to find "talent". Once found they will choose things like producers, engineers and studios for the artist to work with and overall produce the music that will make them their millions. These songs will be rated on the best and the ones with the most potential to be popular and even no.1's will be picked out to publicise further. Once the record is ready to be released the A&R will be informing outlets, shops and the radio to hype the song and get them excited for the release. This will attract the attention of the customers who will in turn buy the album. It is likely that the A&R will have looked into the artist before hand to find out how they have put in effort to build up their own fanbase and be connected in all the social netwroks etc, therefore when hyping the record up and getting poeple intrested for sales it should be quite straight foward.
Marketing
Marketing, again aided by technology, is much easier than before. Sites such as youtube and spotify are prime examples of an artist getting their music heard, anyone can access and listen to their work and then decide wether they are good ore not. Record labels are also able to access their work and will pick out the good bands and artist, in a way guiding the public to listen to their chosen artists. TV talent shows and competitions again are another way of marketing artists, shows like the Xfactor and Britains got talent can promote atrists, sometimes by finding new talent on the actual show or because of guest appearences. Tv competitions can be won where you win tickets to see an artist or get merchandise promoting an artist, sometimes even spend the day with the artist, even further promoting the artist.
Selling the music
New ways of selling the music are again mad eavailable by new technology. The internet opened up new markets such as selling digital copies of songs and albums on things like Itunes, also a promotional free song is often found on such websites promoting the artist further. The actual hard copies willl yhave dropped in sales because of htis however CD's are still the latest form of the hard copy of music, still sold in their millions and very effective. Digipaks which i have looked into in previous post are still very effective, especially to people wanting collectors editions, the digipak will usually come with extra information and merchandise promoting the band. The digital age has revolutionised the way we buy and listen to music, having songs and albums at just a click away has made it extremely easy for artists to be known and become a success.
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