How to Build a Strong Personal Brand as a Music Artist in 2024
Independent music artists and bands are their own small businesses. Any successful small business, should have a strong personal brand. The same is for musicians, especially with how competitive the music business is in 2024. Here, we will discuss 6 essential artist branding tips for music artists to succeed in today’s music industry. Creating your brand and committing to it, will help you to stand out from the crowd and build a loyal fan base.
Why Should Music Artists Focus on Building a Personal Brand?
We eluded to it in the last line, the music industry is a very competitive business. To stand out from the crowd, and be successful, you need to be unique. Having your own brand, helps you to focus on who you are. It displays your unique personality and image in a concise way. This helps you to immediately draw in the right crowd of fans to support you. These days, people are inundated with new music, you have a few seconds to make an impact and connect with new fans.
Having a personal brand as an artist helps you to look professional. It proves that you’re serious about this, your music isn’t just a hobby. Taking the time to build your brand, shows that you’re worthy of fans taking the time to support you. Fans and promoters will take you more seriously. It will improve your odds of being playlisted and getting features on blogs.
What is Artist Branding?
Artist branding is the process to create a unique and concise image that reflects who you are as an artist or band. This will be a marketing tactic to help sell you and your music. It will also help you to more rapidly connect with new fans and promoters.
6 Essential Artist Branding Tips for Music Artists to Succeed
- Identify Your Unique Artist Brand
- Develop Your Visual Identity
- Brand Authenticity is Key
- Be Consistent with Your Brand
- Establish Your Brand’s Audience
- Be Dynamic, Not Boring!
Building a brand starts with identifying who you are and what your brand should be. Below, we will further detail the 6 essential artist branding tips to help you succeed. It all starts with identifying what sets you apart and makes you unique, this will start to build your brand. Then, start to develop it through the visual content you put out. Be consistent with your music marketing, to fit within your brand. Most importantly, you’ll want to be authentic, true to yourself. That will make it easier to promote your brand too. The cherry on top, is to be dynamic, interesting, sell yourself with your artist brand.
Identify Your Unique Artist Brand
- Define your artistic identity and how you want to be viewed. What story do you want to tell through your brand?
- Clearly identify what sets you apart.
- Part of your identity, is your sound, your brand visually and seamlessly represents your sound.
The first step in developing your artist branding, is an obvious one, but maybe the hardest one. You’ll need to identify your unique artist brand, everything will build around this identity. It’s important to get this right, there’s a fine line between overthinking it, and not putting enough time in to it. Your brand identity is how you will want to be scene. Ask yourself, what kind of story do you want to tell? Clearly identify what sets you apart in a concise way, what makes sense and fits you.
Some good ideas to help develop your artist brand, are to create lists, or visual idea boards with key thoughts you have for your brand. Then shorten it up to what your most passionate about and what fits you best. You can also pick 3-5 artists or bands that you identity with or look up to. What about their brands do you like? This can help get the creative juices going. But at the end of the day, your brand is you. The more it fits who you are, the easier it’ll be to sell and live with.
Develop Your Visual Identity
- Your fashion, images, videos, logo, color schemes and even the fonts you use are all part of your visual identity.
- Look at your favorite artists, search through their pages and online presence, how did they develop and showcase their brand? That will help you to get the ball rolling on building your own identity.
Your visual identity is how people will see your brand at a glance. These days, it’s primarily done through your online presence, such as your website, socials and the content you put out. But also, especially if you do a lot of live shows, it’s part of your fashion and style. Some artists are synonymous with a certain style, can you imagine Chris Stapleton without his cowboy hat? Johnny Cash without his black clothes? These styles work for them, because it fits, it’s authentic. So be real, express yourself through your visual identity.
Every image and video you put out helps to further express your visual brand identity. They should be of high quality, to reflect the high quality music you create. You can create an absolute gem of a track, but if the visual content you put out to promote it is low quality… or not well thought out and doesn’t fit your brand, it won’t be as successful. Invest in quality content that reflects who you are. If you need to hire a gigger from Fiverr to help create that content, it’s well worth the investment. Collaborating with graphic designers and videographers to create striking visuals will go a long way to building your brand.
Your image and visual identity will express your artistic vision, get it right. Music videos and content, visually express the music. It should all fit within your brand.
Brand Authenticity is Key
- Authenticity is huge today, fans can see through anything fake. The most successful independent artists today, are incredibly authentic.
- Be genuine and raw, you are your brand. Be open and honest.
Think about all of the artists and bands you connect with the most, it’s because they are authentic. Brand authenticity is very important, fans can tell when something doesn’t feel genuine. Don’t force it, be yourself, the more true and honest you are, the better it is. Your brand should reflect upon who you are as an artist and the music that you create.
Don’t just create a brand you think will sell, your brand is meant to authentically sell who you are as an artist. The more authentic and transparent you are, the easier it’ll be for you to sell and market yourself. This will build a stronger and more loyal fan base in the long run.
Be Consistent with Your Brand
- Everything you put out on your socials, streaming platforms and website, should fit within your brand.
- Regular engagement with your audience on social media. Regularly posting branded content as well.
Consistency is key in any marketing or promotional venture. Especially with your brand, the whole brand comes together through consistency. Your brand needs to be displayed consistently across all of your platforms. Each social page, should have the same profile picture or logo, and ideally the same handle, when possible. All of your platforms should display your visual brand identity clearly. Each should also link back to the same place, if it’s your website (ideally), link tree or whatever song link.
It’s very difficult as a promoter to come across an artist on Spotify, and then their bio doesn’t link back to their socials. A lot of times, we will just give up and move on to another artist then, vs trying to Google them for a feature in our magazine. Make it easy for fans and promoters to connect with you and become part of your mission.
Consistency helps to build recognition, trust and professionalism. Use the same color scheme, tone of voice and album art across all of your platforms to build your brand. Also, consistently put out content that fits with your brand, the images, videos and music that you put out, don’t leave massive gaps between content you release. Consistently engage with your fans as well, reply to comments and messages the best you can. Use social marketing platforms like SocialBee to help build a consistent social marketing strategy around your brand.
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Establish Your Brand’s Audience
- Once your brand is formed, what is your audience? Then develop your music marketing strategy within your brand to match that audience.
- Use analytics and any other data you can pull from your socials and streaming platforms to know your target audience.
Once your brand is established, built out and beautifully displayed for all to see, it’s time to hone in on your brand’s audience. Use whatever analytics and statistics you have at your disposal to analyze and determine your brand’s audience. Most social platforms will have analytics available to review, this will help you to determine your target audience. This info, will help you to create more targeted ads to promote to, which will lower your ad costs and efficiency. It can, also help to tweak your brand a bit to fit your target demographic better. But again, stay authentic to yourself, so that’s a fine line to work with.
Most importantly, once you establish your brand audience, it will help to optimize your music marketing strategy. Saving you money, and getting your music in to more ears.
Make sure your harvesting emailing addresses to your mailing list from your target audience. You can do this for free or a low price with email marketing platforms like Brevo, that’s what we use.
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Be Dynamic & interesting, Not Boring!
- Your brand is meant to advertise who you are and build your audience. With that said, as with any marketing strategy, you’ll want your brand to be dynamic and interesting. Finding a way to do this, while remaining authentic and true to yourself, is the sweet spot.
- You want to be compelling through your brand, grab attention.
- Sell yourself, who you are and why fans should listen to your music.
Have some fun with it! The more fun you have, the more real and authentic you are, the more interesting you’ll be. Don’t fake it and force being interesting. Just show who you are through your artist brand. Be creative with the content you push. Don’t push the same old carbon copy content. You can follow trends, that helps, but what’s even better is to be the trend setter.
The content you put out through your brand should be compelling, to help grow your fan base. Grab peoples attention, quickly show why your pages are worth a follow and your music is worth a listen. Create a dynamic, engaging brand. Build excitement around who you are and the music you create. This will help to sell yourself and your brand.
It will also help to tell your story as a musician. Your personal journey as an artist is a powerful tool to reaching new fans and growing a stronger connection with current fans. If you’ve overcome struggles along the way, don’t shy away from that, embrace it and express it. Jelly Roll does this brilliantly with his artistic evolution. Craft a real, authentic and compelling narrative around who you are with your artistic branding. Do interviews with magazines (like ours!) and other podcasts to help express your story and brand.
In Conclusion.
There ya go, 6 steps to help you develop, build and promote your artist branding. Sounds like a lot of work, but it’s all worth it in the end. Plus, once established and in the middle of it, it’s not too hard. Essentially, it’s a way to build a concise, professional image of yourself. Building a strong artist brand will 100% pay off in the end. Every successful independent artist has a strong brand that they built for themselves. It shows that you looked at the bigger picture of who you are as an artist or band. You took the time to think things through. This is your dream, do everything in your power to succeed. If you ever need help, reach out to us with any questions you have. We’re always here to help. Good luck!
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