Analysis
We began by interviewing a couple of local musicians we know personally.
In order to get a more holistic perspective of the industry, we interviewed Justin Wesley. Justin is a music journalist for NUVO, an alternative publication about Indianapolis’ weekly cultural news such as music, theater, politics, and the arts.
As a local music journalist, Justin wants to inform and influence people in Indianapolis to be engaged with music.
These are some of the key things he told us:
We also did a guided tour of a record label, Joyful Noise Recordings.
In order to understand how a local musician might produce his own music, we utilized a touchstone tour to observe the at-home recording process. Diop, who we previously interviewed, has his music recorded and produced by Nick Smith, otherwise known as Mandog. Coincidentally, Nick was also an intern at Joyful Noise (and knows Owen, who is also an intern at Joyful.)
Nick was prepared to have Diop rerecord part of a song and he led us through his process, allowing us to see exactly how he uses his tools.
These are some insights we discovered:
-
Most musicians don't know how to
market themselves -
There is a lack of "tastemakers" in Indy
-
Networking must be strategic because there are different genres and audiences
-
It is important for musicians to network because that is how labels find them
How might we understand the role of music
on Indianapolis culture from the perspective
of the independent musician?
1
They were able to provide us with different perspectives because they are from separate genres. They are also at different points in their musical careers, so we were able to hear about their varying challenges.
We learned that local musicians…
How might we understand the role of industry
professionals in the success of local artists?
Musicians have trouble with marketing
Since the challenges of marketing were brought up from both an artist and professional perspective, we guided our next methods in a direction that would help us learn more about marketing.
Several Indy musicians have gone national
The music community in Indy is growing
How might we understand the local music marketing
process and the effect it has on the audience?
We created an online survey to help us figure out how Indianapolis audiences find information about local musicians. This gave us an idea of what marketing tactics are currently working and it also gave us a basic understanding of the audience’s behaviors.
We found that many people who listen to local music typically...
Music
Audience
Motivation
Making process
Opinion of
the industry
3
After hearing the artist perspective, we wanted to understand
the Indianapolis scene in a broader sense.
2
4
How might we understand a local musician's
production process?
Although we were already identifying plenty of
marketing challenges, we still thought it would be helpful
to explore the production process to get the bigger picture.
How might we understand our data
in order to develop a Challenge Statement?
5
With all of this research done, our team knew there were important connections within our data, but we needed to visualize it.
Owen Yonce
Diop
We prepared a list of questions to ask the musicians about their...
Our project began with 5 weeks of researching our context using various methods.
Want to connect and collaborate
Feel the need to stay genuine
Spend a lot of time making music
Have a hard time with marketing
“purveyors of interesting media for a variety of artistically-honest, exploratory & often haphazard musicians.”
A big part of their responsibility is to handle public relations for their artists. This ties into marketing, so we thought their perspective would be helpful. Daniel Coles, their PR Liaison, took us for a tour through their space and talked to us about how he promotes their artists. We also asked him questions about his career, knowledge of the Indy music scene, and his relationships within it. Ultimately, we learned about Joyful’s process of finding artists and promoting.
Some of our key findings were that Joyful Noise...
Finds bands through networking
Is friends with other record labels
Creates valuable products
of the musician’s work
Promotes heavily on social media
Buy music digitally
Attend two concerts per month
Seeing this process in action made us realize that the producer and musician need to have a trusting relationship.
In the same week, we did additional interviews with musicians. We asked similar questions as the first set of interviews, but we decided to focus a bit more on their perceptions of marketing for musicians.
One of our interviewees, Eli Crow, is a young musician and student currently in Indianapolis. He told us about how he has a hard time fitting into the community of current “cliques” because they are separated by genres. He also explained how he has a hard time recording his own music.
Our other interviewee was Jordan Smith, a singer in the band Diarrhea Planet. He started making music in Indianapolis but moved to Nashville and has achieved success there. He opened our eyes to what makes a music scene successful in a city like Nashville, as well as what it's like for musicians to go national. Jordan informed us that Nashville’s scene is thriving because musicians are likely to be noticed by industry professionals, there’s a strong sense of community, and it has tastemakers who help inform the audience and promote musicians.
Find musicians on blogs and social media
1.
gather samples
2.
create patterns
3.
compose beats
share
4.
5.
musician collaboration
record
6.
7.
mix
get feedback
8.
9.
finalize
mandog & diop's production process
Music
Audience
Motivation
Making process
Opinion of
the industry
Marketing
“How might we help Indianapolis
musicians develop relationships in order
to collaborate and network easier?”
We had a lot of data, so we began our synthesis by mapping each method's findings.
After all of our data was on the map, we identified the recurring themes within it and coded the themes with symbols.
The major themes that stood out to us throughout all of our research included:
Networking Community Collaboration Marketing
1.
2.
We transferred our data to Post-it notes and sorted them based on main ideas and connections.
3.
We developed insights from the main ideas
4.
4.
We mapped the connections between the insights, formed insight clusters, and realized that there were two main types of relationships, either between musician & audience or musician & musician.
Our final challenge statement, which guided us through
the remainder of our project, was:
We decided to focus on the relationships between musicians because the benefits of those relationships have the potential to help solve many of the other problems we identified.
We realized that musicians need to develop relationships with each other because it can help them develop their skills, move between cliques in the scene, and build their networks that can then help them connect to industry professionals.
