What's in the Brand??

When I first started out as a "professional" artist right out of school, the last thing on my mind was the "complete package". I wasn't thinking about my brand. I was only thinking about my art. I just wanted to sing! To be honest, even now, I only claim most of the blame. I was never told to care about anything else, really.....except maybe being well groomed at auditions.

WeLL I'm TeLLiNG YoU NoW! Your Brand is Important...maybe even more important than your talent! Got it? Good!

How can I start improving my Brand Now?

1. Be good at what you do. A good musician is definately very important..but don't stop there.
2. Look the part... all the time. If you are going for the rock star persona, you need to be the rock star every time you are in public. If you are Mic Jagger, you have to be Mic Jagger all the time in public. Now, if you are having a BBQ at your house with your closest friends and you want to wear your glasses and sweats, fine... but when you are rockin' the club, you had better be dressed to impress...doesn't matter that you weren't playing that night. You never know who you might meet. And, they won't believe you if you are wearing your Clark Kent glasses, if you get my drift.... We'll talk more about fashion in another post.
3. Have a business card and carry it with you all the time. I know you are a band/ soloist, but it will make you appear more professional and organized. You can get them printed cheaply... check out VistaPrint.com. Which leads me to no.4
4. Come up with a logo.. a graphic. Put an ad on craigslist and offer $50, get an artist friend, or do it yourself, and come up with a logo for your band or yourself if you're solo. It will go on T's, your business card, letter head, website... whatever! Make the design as good as you can afford. This will be your mark. You want people to see that image and know who it pretains to. Examples: Kiss, Rolling Stones, Prince... when I say those names... you can immediately think of their logos. That is what you want to replicate for yourselves.
5. Blog. Blog. Blog. You want to have your name and sound in as many places as you can get it on the net. You want to be active on your site so that it will be the first one to pop up in Goggle searches. So, blog, blog, blog!
6. Be consistent in the way you treat your fans. If you have a gig at a coffee shop and you spend 45 minutes talking to people after the show, then make sure you do that when you open Tracy Byrd at the Fox Theater downtown. Be consistent. Your return fans will not return if you snub them. Now, if it's your style to never spend time with fans...then be consistent with that....though I don't suggest that avenue. Meet and Greet is important. The important part is that you learn to be very consistent with your fans. It's part of the job. And, it is a job people.


If you can add these things to what you are doing already, you will see improvement.
These tips are a place to begin on the branding road.
The bottom line, we're in the Music BUSINESS. It's the pesky the business part that will get us if we don't pay attention. And, for so long, so many of us have just been concentrating on the Music part... which is fine and dandy until we need to make a living.
Buckle down and add a few of the business bits and you'll begin to pick up speed!