As anyone in the music industry will tell you, ensuring that your work and artistry stand out is crucial to helping you reach a larger audience and grow your listenership. The best way to help you do this is to create a solid artist identity. This will help make sure your art is instantly recognisable when your future listeners are scrolling on their timelines and for you pages.
But how do you get there?
Artist identity doesn’t have to be difficult or long-winded. To help you navigate creating your artist identity we’ve put together some of our top tips.
Identify your unique selling point
Your unique selling point, or USP, is going to be the thing that makes you stand out from other musicians in your genre or area. Your unique selling point should be something that you can use within your branding and fully own.
There are a lot of different elements that you could consider to be your unique selling point. For example, it could be your personal style or the story of how you became the artist you are today. You could consider using a particular message or set of values, or if you have a unique sound in the tracks you’ve created.
All of these will help create a unique identity and help it to become instantly recognisable.
Understand your audience
You probably wouldn’t think it, but understanding your audience is a large part of establishing your artist’s identity.
When you know who your audience is, the easier it is to create content that will resonate with them. This will help you increase your audience engagement with your music and boost your online presence.
This can also help develop your unique selling point, as you can use the values your audience believes in your personal values – if they align. You will also get an idea of what types of content or music won’t work with your audience, it allows you to get the most out of your content as possible.
Build your online presence.
Building your online presence is probably one of the most important aspects of your artists identity, without it how will listeners old and new find you? How will they get to know what your message is? Tour dates? New release? The list is endless.
By creating a robust online presence, you can bring all your artist information into one central place whether that’s through your social media profiles or on your website. This makes your work easily accessible to your listenership.
If you’re unsure of how to structure your online presence, think about what it is you want to tell your audience and where you want to do it.
For example, some artists will use their social media to show off their personalities, connect with their fans, and share listen links for their followers to find their music.
Some will use their website to showcase more information about themselves. Here you can consider having an ‘about you’ section which highlights your life and career milestones, your start in music, and you can use this opportunity to go into more detail about the values and messages that you’ve outlined in your unique selling point.
You can use your website as an online store for your merchandise and tour dates.
Visual identity
There can be more to visual identity than what you first think. But it can include anything from logos, merchandise, album covers, and social media.
When you’re putting these together, you should try and make them cohesive. This will make your brand instantly identifiable when it’s seen without context (for example, album covers on shelves, on festival and show lineups, on a social media post on a timeline or a for you page).
Your visual identity can represent your personality and music. A lot of artists will work in partnership with graphic designers to ensure that their visual identity and brand are professional and visually appealing.
Consistency
Once you’ve put your artist identity together you need to ensure you keep it consistent. Your music, content, visuals, and the way you speak to your audience on social media and in newsletters all align with your brand identity.
This will help you build trust with your audience and will boost your brand recognition.
Evolve over time
As with everything in life, over time people will evolve and change. This is no different with your artist identity.
It’s healthy to grow as an artist, the way that your brand represented you when you first started out in the industry, might not necessarily align with who you are now.
Not only this, but evolving your brand will help you keep up with pop culture changes, or if you decide to experiment with your sound.
Get in touch
Here at Horus Music, we pride ourselves on supporting artists new and old, through the different stages of their careers. Artists can use our marketing services to help promote their work or get in touch with the team here.
