Brand man: Branding before I knew the meaning of the word. (Part 2/3)
Connection. That’s what music (art really) is all about.
Connecting with people who share your passions, interests or anything else is what makes us human. Whether you believe in souls, exchange of chemicals or any other path, what is observably undeniable is that people gravitate towards one another. And art becomes manifestations of those connections.
Back then, we (the band) had something to say. And, we said it through our music. We finally built something worth sharing. Our first album.
But, we were hit with the reality that not everyone cares. At least at first. So, we had to have something interesting that made them care outside of seeing us perform these songs that made them feel something.
With the help of our friends, we began planning. We had inspiration, we crafted a story, and we were ready to launch something worth buying.
Five songs. One spoken word. Two secret demos. And, one automatic website launcher as soon as you put the CD in your computer drive. (Ah, iTunes changed everything.)
Building Something Special
First came the concept, “Integral X Bar.” According to study.com, “X-bar is the symbol (or expression) used to represent the sample mean,” a mathematical representation of our song “Minds of the Sample,” which celebrated our tribe coming together. Integral, defined in vocabulary.com, is “something that is […] important or the result of a mathematical integration.”
In simpler words, our concept was held together by the societal need of different thinking minds and the celebration of those minds finding each other.
Finding each other also extended to our support team, designers and photographers who took this concept and elevated it to a singular symbol.
We had photoshoots, brainstorm sessions and collaborative back-and-forths. Everything laddering up to a unique story.
Our band was a crew of Alaskan oil tanker workers who found a medallion washed up on the beach swimming in crude oil after a massive rig disaster. The medallion in the album cover was a portal and the music the vessel.
Bringing these ideas together felt natural. All this work was just playing for us. CD covers, videos, posters, social profile photos, and stickers were all made and printed. We had a whole kit of parts ready to sell.
What I didn’t realize then is that we had literally created a full integrated marketing campaign for a decade not ready for what we were about to do.
We created a brand that belonged to anyone willing to give it a try.
Dawn of the Online Music Revolution
In the post-Napster era, having CDs and posters was cool at shows, but we still knew we had to show up on the first page of Google.
This became our obsession.
LiveJournal, MySpace, PureVolume, Facebook, YouTube, ReverbNation, you name it. If there was a website where we could upload our songs, we were in it. (But not all of them.)
Then, a friend introduced us to CD Baby. The home of all independent musicians back in those days. For us, it was the death of the label because we could publish to paying sites ourselves. We didn’t need a label to be on iTunes, we could do it ourselves!
This was the beginning of my career in the world of building brands. I had discovered an independent, entrepreneurial mindset that would drive my passion for building brands, thanks to the mistakes, lessons and wins from those early days in the 2000’s.
Tapping into that mindset would lead me towards a career in advertising, where in portfolio school I finally learned the proper names of the things I had been doing all those years before.
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Please follow this three-part, personal journey on how music and my local music scene shaped my now. (Read Part 1 here.) Part 3 is now live.
