Naming the Band
The band was originally a duo of Fraser and Shaun that I joined towards the end of February 2019. For our first practice sessions, we got together and swapped our different musical ideas and chatted about music. As I was joining their band and they were very welcoming to me , I wanted to continue that trend for our project and make sure that every major decision that we made in terms of the image and promotion of the band as well as our sound was a democratic decision.
Therefore, when the subject of band names came up I was informed that their project was originally called Mother fungus and Shaun was extremely keen on keeping that name as a band going forward. My first thoughts of the name were that it wouldn’t go down well as a band name, however as it grew on me and as people I knew gave me their feedback I began to feel very excited at the prospect of performing and writing in a band called Mother Fungus.
For me the name Mother Fungus, encapsulated the theme that something big would emerge out of our crazy ideas and that the bold name would set the bar for our music.
I had a brief look into copyright for a band name, this might be something that I look more into after the project is over.
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/legally-trademark-band-name-54670.html
Social Media
5 Steps to Successfully Promote Your Music Using Social Media
Above is an incredibly in depth article and guide on how to promote your music on social media. It comprises of five steps broken down into different sections which allows for a very detailed overview of the whole process. I am going to analyse this article in order to extract as much useful information as possible, I will do this by individual analysing each step and trying to understand how I can implement these tips into my promotional strategy.
Step One – Promotional Strategy
As we are a new band and don’t have that much of a following or repertoire at the moment, I will mainly be focusing on initially exposing our music to the local scene of Bradford as well as trying to build our social media following. The success of this project as a whole will not be based upon the amount of social media followers we have at the end of it, however it would be nice to see a steady increase in our following and the interest in our band, so as to build on it in the future.
I will be attempting to establish a band aesthetic as well as a structured content schedule in order to produce consistent and high quality material. Overall, I think it is much more important to produce high quality content on a weekly basis compared to a lot of unorganised and low quality material. The quality of our promotion will also rely on a mixture of material, which will create a well structured variety of entertainment.
Currently the majority of the band are on instagram and have our own music pages, including myself. As this band is initially a part of my final project, I will be in control of the social media promotion. However, I will encourage the rest of the band to sen me material and get involved as well as sharing everything across their individual music pages in order to gain more exposure.
Step Two – Decide The Content You Should Create
Out of the three main options for content creation stated in this article, I will be exploring documenting and entertainment. Being a student and only just beginning to discover out sound as a band, I don’t think I would feel fully confident to do videos with a more educational theme and I don’t think it would suit the bands image to do that. However, if someone comments a question about the music, I would be more than happy to answer it.
I will be documenting my music process for my project anyway and therefore if I produce some quality material through that, it would be a good opportunity to feed it into my promotion. Documentation could include pictures and videos of band rehearsals and performances as well as other activities with the band such as photoshoots and artwork. As long as we are documenting interesting things, then I thik our audience will be excited to see what is happening.
The other area of entertainment is one that I think we could tap into, as we are all interesting individuals and therefore could create some exciting material for the promotion process.
For my three key themes, I will look to focus on documenting the initial and early stages of my and the bands compositions, band rehearsals and evolutions of those songs and performances and additional events. I think that these three themes will allow me to develop our progression as a band and allow our social media followers to take part in our journey.
Step Three – Choose The Right Social Media Platform To Promote Your Music
For my social media promotion, I will be promoting on Facebook and Instagram with heavy focus on Instagram. I have chosen these two platforms as I believe they will be the best ones to use to promote with the type of content we will be creating, they are also the most open in order to build links with our supporters other than Twitter. The reason I have decided not to use Twitter is that I am not currently familiar with it and therefore I don’t believe that it is worth spending the time promoting on that platform for this project.
The appeal of using both Facebook and Instagram is that you can add the same post to them simultaneously as the apps are linked to one another which means that I do not have to spend huge amounts of time setting up different platforms. Facebook will help us more with interacting with the local community as we can create events and interact with people whereas Instagram’s hashtag trending feature will allow us to expand upon that.
Step Four – Establish Which Mediums To Use For Your Content
Of the five suggestions in step four we will probably be doing four of them. These include video based content, cover songs, collaborations and image based content.
Video and image based content will be the main outlets in which we promote in a band, meaning that we will have to create a good image for the band in order to distinguish ourselves and create our own look. This will be something that I explore further into my promotion research.
As I have said, most of the band members in Mother Fungus have other musical projects that they are working on, therefore I will try to tap into this as a way to gain new followers by tagging that artist in posts.
For our final set as a band we will be doing a mixture of covers and originals, therefore by documenting these covers , we could appeal to fans of that artist and branch out into different scenes of music fans on social media.
Although we probably won’t be using too much text based content, we might do some face book posts in order to give people an idea of how we are developing as a band and what to expect in the future.
Step Five – Distribute Your Content To An Audience
To sum up how I am going to distribute our content, it will mainly focus around content being uploaded to social media accounts every week. I am going to aim for two posts a week which will probably consist of one band rehearsal and one additional piece of content. I will be using my collaborations with local groups and venues such as Bradford community broadcasting (BCB) and Bradford College which will allow me to share upcoming events on their social media pages. A large way of reaching new people will be hashtags on instagram and therefore I will look at which are the best hashtags to get results within my genre of music.
Promoting the band
The first step of our promotion structure was to set up a band instagram page and email account.
Fresh Account –
Two Posts in –
Setting up the Facebook Page
On Monday 1st April, I created a Facebook page for the band. I held off for doing this until week five as I thought that our content creation was much more tailored to the format of Instagram. However, as I had just organised an event for the 26th April, I felt that it was the right opportunity to reach out to the Facebook audience.
Here is the initial look at our Facebook page, in order to get the ball rolling I invited all of my friends to like the page and asked the other band members to share it. From what I can understand with Facebook at the viewpoint of being in a band, it is quite hard to promote yourself to a newer audience and therefore for this project, Facebook would be used more for updates about the band and the bands gig as well as a base for new fans to go to if they had hear about us in other ways or seen us live.
After the first twenty four hours, we had 105 likes which were all people that the band members were friends with but was still a major achievement. This led to us feeling very excited for the gig ahead on the 26th April.
Our Social Media At The End Of The Project
As you can see, by the end of the project Mother Fungus had 83 followers on Instagram and we had also amounted 124 followers on Facebook. Overall, I felt that Instagram was the best site to interact with our audience and therefore I focused a lot more of our promotion efforts on the site.
Our posts were averaging at about 50 likes on Instagram compared to about 20 on Facebook and although we had more followers on Facebook, I decided to go with how many people were actively interacting with the page which was based around the amount of likes and comments we were getting comparatively on each site.
However it was still good to keep up our appearance on Facebook and it was a great way to advertise events by allowing me to create event pages.
Here is my personal music Instagram, which I have worked on over the past year. I took a lot of effort on this project to continue to upload and promote my page and by the ned of the project I was sitting on 145 followers which I was very happy with. On this page , I promoted Mother Fungus and other projects such as Dineo’s EP and Zed Leppelin. By planning my upload schedule and using a range of relevant hashtags, I began to see my likes improve and by the end of the project was regularly getting around 60 likes. Hopefully I can continue to upload quality content and continue to grow my fan base in the future.
Developing the Bands look
The stereotypical look of jazz band is one of formal clothes including suits and dresses and is overall very smart.
On this webpage from playguitarlive.com, it states that ‘Jazz is open to anything, as long as you dress a step above your audience. You want your clothes to represent your music, so you don’t want to look as if you were going to the mall.’ (Hailstone,2016).
Here is the standardised ‘jazz look’ which is one that so many jazz bands operate. Having performed in a suit or smart dress before, I can understand the feeling of distinction that dressing this way can give you and the benefits such as added confidence that it can give you.
Interestingly, many of the contemporary bands and artists that I am trying to emulate musically dress in a much more relaxed and casual style.
Here is a great shot of Gogo penguin playing a live gig in Philadelphia as you can see although two of the members are dressed smart casual, the drummer is incredibly casual whilst playing a big concert.
Again, Mammal hands are a well established uk jazz band who have a very similar approach to their style.
Jacob Collier takes casualness to the next level as well as musical talent and often wears a range of baggy jumpers and poncho’s at his gigs.
Traditional and contemporary
In the images above, I have displayed a mixture of traditional and contemporary approaches to jazz style on stage. Whilst they are seemingly the opposites and represent different sub genres of jazz as well as different individual lifestyles, all the bands that I have used as examples have one thing in common in that they consistently keep the same onstage presence in terms of their look. This was a very important theme talked about in the article that I analysed in the above in the social media section.
Consistency in anything helps to build momentum and establish a strong base from which an artist can begin to be recognised for their expressive works.
In order to create a consistent image as a band, I will therefore have to look at other bands and artists and the styles that interest me and see what I can come up with. The final decision will of course be made democratically by the full band.
Bands that have created their own image
Phony ppls are a band that I had never heard of until I discovered this tiny desk concert of them, one of the main reasons that I clicked on the video and stuck around to watch the whole clip was because of the bands colourful outfits as well as, of course, their music.
Here is another band that have racked up a ton of views on the tiny desk session. Although they have a very simple name, their image is quite striking and creates an intrigue for the viewer.
These two examples show how important it is to get something as simple as a thumbnail perfect in order to represent yourself to the optimum amount on streaming and social media sites such as you tube.
Of course, it is all completely subject to the viewers preference, however I know I am much more easily intrigued by something that is bright and colorful or that has a hint of mystery and weirdness to it.
Our Image
When looking at creating a band poster for our mock event, I stumbled across an image of a group of neon fungus. I thought that neon would be a really cool theme to follow as we could all go for different bright colours and really accessorise with glitter.
During the project, I was asked to help a friend with their final year makeup exam. Their theme for the exam was under the sea and therefore I was made to look like the picture above. Overall, the experience was really exciting and it was the kind of look that I had imagined for Mother Fungus, being some sort of futuristic rainbow show. However the process took over a couple of hours and therefore I was wondering if we could strip it back a bit and maybe compromise in certain parts. We will see what sort of look I can develop in the future.
The mother fungus band idea was completely built around this image of psychedelia and the growth of the band into a big strange entity. I wanted our image and artwork to represent those things and therefore set out to research how to accomplish this. Go to the band artwork tab to take a look at the images designed for us over the course of this project.
Promoting on my radio show
I am lucky enough to have a monthly jazz show that airs on BCB (bradford community broadcast) on the first Tuesday of every month. The shows usually involve me and a guest talking about different jazz songs and artists that we like as well as discussing upcoming events in Bradford. I will therefore be using my slot to promote both upcoming events and the bands social media pages. I am not sure how many people listen to my show on BCB however, every little helps.