The Artist Rise #018
Welcome to your weekly resource for all things branding, release strategy, and overall artist development.
Every week I'll help you tackle brand-building and strengthen your artistry by asking questions that dig deeper into your true artist self. Let's get into it.
The Question
This week's question: If your songs were to come to life in another form, how would they tell their story? What would they look like if they weren't music?
(Before you think I'm crazy, just hear me out, I promise I'm getting somewhere with this)
Let's get into it.
The Importance
What's the first thing you think of when it comes to promoting your next release: content.
And content these days has a few words it carries around like baggage: oversaturated, basic, and a bunch of other ways of saying "I am stranded in 200 view jail, and I'm tired of doing the same things over and over to try and get people to hear my song"
All valid points.
But with this shift towards more community-driven mentalities and building approaches rather than chasing trends and seeking these big viral moments, the content you create should shift too.
This is where we put our branding thinking caps on and strap in.
The hardest thing about trying a new style of content or build on a new idea is creating the idea itself and figuring out "what's something new that I can do that people haven't really seen before?".
Well, the best way to think about it is to look at yourself as an artist and see what other creative ideas or expressions we haven't dabbled in yet.
How can I package my music in a new and not-so-obvious way that both aligns with who I am as an artist and is something people will find value or entertainment in?
So I've started asking a probing question to get at this answer: "when you think about your songs, are they diary entries? A stream of consciousness? A conversation with a friend? A performance in its own right? What does the song VISUALLY look like?
And that comes from digging within and finding who you are as a creator and an artist beyond just a songwriter.
If you're someone who's been falling into the path of creating the types of content everyone else is doing, there's good reason why you haven't yet seen a return on your time investment.
Because when you create like everyone else, you fall into this unidentifiable pile with all the other artists telling you who they sound like or who their song is for.
But if you treat it as its own separate idea and approach it from a creating-for-the-fans standpoint because that's what matters and that is how your brand then gets validated.
It always feels challenging to go "against the grain" and it's easy to just fall into the norm so you can say you're doing social and putting effort into promo, but the real growth and progress happens once you recognize that building your own lane is the only way to really make it down the highway.
Stop sitting in traffic and let's start paving.
Your Task
Examine songs from your catalog and start trying to visualize what it looks like.
It might not be explicit and it may start feeling like building a music video, but dig through the lyrics and see what the story itself looks like.
How can you best showcase your perspective? How do those words come to life?
Start brainstorming and exploring how that can be packaged.
It doesn't even have to be something that could be put into a video, we can keep it simply visual.
But take the music away and see what the story sparks in itself.
There's no wrong answer, and it may take some trial and error, but find what form of expression speaks to you and your music.
-Ava
Talk it out: As previously promised, I want you to provide the opportunity to talk this out and explore it further, so you're welcome to share your origin/growth story in a reply to this email, or chat about it with me.
That's it for this week! Hopefully this helped you take the next step in developing yourself as an artist and a brand. Stay tuned for more next week.
If you have any topics you want to see more of or any questions you'd love for me to answer, simply reply to this email.
Keep learning and growing,
Ava Rose Lynch
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