It's All About the Song : The Praxis of Artist Branding In the Finnish Recording Industry

Abstract

In this thesis I will examine how the major record companies create and manage artists' images and artist brands for the purposes of selling popular music in the Finnish market. I will define the components of the artist's image and the artist brand together with the processes of artist image management and artist branding. I will also discuss the role of publicity in the creation and development of artist brands. Because of the lack of tradition and a common language with which the record companies' personnel would deal with artist brands and image related questions, I have also felt the need to present the conceptions of how the recording industry workers perceive the concepts of 'artist's image' and 'artist brand'.

I will discuss the research questions in the contexts of the Digital Experience Economy and celebrity culture. I will reveal how the digital business environment and Experience Economy principles have affected and are expected to affect artist image management and artist brands. The Digital Experience Economy is defined through the theories of Joseph B. Pine and James H. Gilmore together with David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard. The celebrity culture I will examine mainly through the hypotheses of Chris Rojek. The theories of image management and image formation I base for the most parts on the notions of Elisa Ikävalko and Erkki Karvonen. The theories of branding and marketing communications rely mainly on the conceptions of David A. Aaker, Erich Joachimsthaler and Philip Kotler.

The empiric part of the study is conducted as a qualitative research. I have interviewed seven record company employees that have had a key role in the development of current Finnish artist brands. The interview data has been analysed using the methods of Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis.

The study results show that the Finnish recording industry workers conceive an artist's image as a preliminary stage of an artist brand. An image is developed to a brand as a result of the artist's consequent behaviour and the consequent marketing communications from the record company's part. The study results also show that record companies cannot control the publicity or the formation of the artist's image and artist brand. The only person who can have a significant effect on the formation of the image and the brand is the artist himself. However two different lines of branding processes were discovered: branding-from-the-inside and branding-from-the-outside. In the branding-from-the-inside record companies let the artist brand to develop on its own. This method is mostly used with singer-songwriters and artists that aim for long careers. The branding-from-the-outside method is more frequently used with phenomenon artists and artists that suddenly gain publicity. In the branding-from-the-outside method record companies take a more active role in advising the artists. In both the branding methods the role of the musical content was emphasised. All the interviewees underlined the importance of a good song in the success of an artist. Otherwise no single formula of building artist brands was found.

The study results indicate that artists cannot be branded in the same way as traditional products. This fact was also demonstrated in the application of brand theories to the interview data. The brand theories I had selected for this study proved to be difficult to apply to the praxis of artist branding.