Identifying your unique, artistic selling proposition, your artistic USP, can be a bewildering task. First of all – pure artistry and differentiated marketing analysis don’t really seem to slow-dance quite well. Obviously, infusing your creative activities with market concerns or thoughts on your product just takes some magic out of the process. But it doesn’t have to – because these thoughts can actually elevate the potential of your music’s impact.
Finding the thing or even things that really matter about your work can greatly uplift an entire musical project. It can also offer you important cornerstones of personal development, ranging from artistic choice-making to visual branding.
So, let’s start with a localization:
Is your product market driven or creatively sovereign?
Some pieces of music are entirely market driven: Being produced for a certain temporary niche or hype, they have a distinct function that resolves when introduced to a market.
Being aware of your position within this dynamic. Meaning are you attached to this evolving market of trends and fashions, which is entirely fine, or are your sovereign – can greatly help define a artistic USP.
Working independently from any current tastes can be liberating. Still, it also exhausting when trying to dock on to certain taste-makers and media gatekeepers.
Also, be aware that trying to force a sense of uniqueness within our current musical sphere can be a truly nebulous task. The amount of diversity within streaming is just non- exhaustive, it goes on and on. More likely than not, you are prone to find some musical reference points within this sphere. Being oblivious to this can hold you back though, and keep you from locating your music successfully within a complex musical field.
Create a playlist mood board to effectively self-locate
Closely related to the last thought lies an effort to further self-locate your music.
Visual- and film artists use mood boards all the time to translate a certain mood. You can harness this technique by engaging in a similar mechanic. Setting up an auditory mood board, by means of playlisting, to mesh your sound with things currently trending and popping on streaming services.
See how your music feels, maybe even between external songs that you think might suit the mood. You’re likely to stumble upon some interesting surprises, especially concerning shared aesthetics and also differences.
Create a playlist mood board, self-locate and maybe even share the experience with some close feedbackers that you trust.
What you want isn’t necessarily what you are
An immensely important part of identifying a unique, artistic selling proposition is being real about your self-image and strengths.
It’s a point that many creators rarely achieve, yet if they do, emerge to something truly unique.
Embrace the nature of what you truly are. Don’t chase down references acts as a major step towards identifying a singular vision.
Identify and be aware of engagement
Use tools like ForTunes to identify hot-spots of engagement within your digital sphere. This means chasing down user-generated-content, but also staying on top of things in terms of data analysis.
Even though you might dig a specific song within your repertoire, really find out which pieces of music perform exceptionally well across platforms.
You might be able to find hidden champions that you weren’t even aware of. These insights can navigate you towards a distinct artistic USP, narrowing down what it is that makes your project special, and unique, in the digital context.
1 one already already liked this, but everybody needs a friend, so give us a <3