
Storytelling for musicians is one of the most important branding techniques. Musicians are known for creating lyrics and stories…but how could we translate this into getting our music heard? The first impression is the most important. This is what is going to determine if a listener listens to your songs or skips them right away. Here we are going to give you the best tips for storytelling for musicians.
Your mission is to make the most of your package so people want to dig deeper. So how could we use this to our advantage? The answer isn’t new:
STORYTELLING
We have to give form to our own story, know if it’s gonna be understood by our target audience (although we believe it’s also good to follow your own instinct), and the most important thing, it can’t be boring (if there’s no story, we always can fabricate one, but if the story is true or is under our mood, way better). Before anything, we’ll need to identify what are the strengths of your storytelling as artists as much as the songs’.
Here you have a graphic that explains the most basic steps for good storytelling.
The majority of stories are guided by this reasoning but it’s true that each story has its order and maybe it’s not formed by all causes that appear on this map or it might have others not appearing here. But it can never fail a point of Disruption and a Ritual.
Disruption:
What has changed? What’s changing or what needs to be changed? Here you have to offer a unique value proposition/reason on why to engage people. If it’s well expressed they won’t press the next button – in this way, the skip rate value will stay around the right average.
Ritual:
The ritual is the general feeling that the story has awakened in your target audience. Depending on the feeling that has been woken, your listeners/followers can also turn into your own brand ambassadors.
One of the most used words between several branding techniques is what’s the look or listen & feel of the artistic project. Here we’re referring to the first emotion that viewers or listeners experiment with when they’re seeing anybody or anything you imagine that’s related to your project or listening to your music for the first time.
We also need to take care of the content that we share on our social media platforms. This is not only about what our story is but also about how we communicate it. The video content is the most popular now, however, the first thing is to have a good name, one specialized typography (+ color), a logo for the general project, and a good photographic session. Furthermore, once we have created our general imaginary, we’ll need to make the same exercise for each release.
Here’s a branding sentence that we take our attention to: “You’ll be killing it when they listen to you without having to sell yourself.”
Maybe we’re in front of a truth reasoning, but we always need to make a double-check. In the end, we always have to update the strategy according to the new practices that are emerging.