Making the Brand: The Role of Branding in Popular Music

Stop trying to treat music like it’s a tennis shoe, something to be branded. […] A piece of art is not a loaf of bread.[…] People who look at music as commerce don’t understand that. They are talking about pieces of plastic they want to sell […] I’m not interested in selling pieces of plastic (Jeff Tweedy of Wilco qtd. in Jardin: 2).

“Don’t tell me I’m a brand. I’m famous and people recognize me, but I can’t look in the mirror and see my brand identity” (Courtney Love qtd. in Love 2000).

Although both Love and Tweedy depend on a music industry to earn a living, their comments keenly illustrate the tension that exists when the words “music” and “industry” are combined. Music and art are about expression and experience. Industry is about creating brands and selling plastic. While studies of packaged goods, consumer commodities and even service-oriented products routinely refer to and analyze brands, studies of cultural goods like music rarely employ the term. On the one hand, this absence is understandable, given the extreme aversion to the term from artists like Tweedy and Love. However, the lack of acknowledgement that, in some instances, artists and music products can be branded is strange, especially at a time when artists are increasingly branching out beyond music and showing just how branded they are (e.g. J-Lo’s line of undergarments or Britney Spears’ perfume come to mind). The goal of this paper then, is to call attention to mechanics of branding in popular music. Using the case of Radiohead, I consider whether or not music artists and products can be considered as brands? If so, then what are the components that constitute music brands? How are they created? And finally, what are the possible effects of branding on artists, listeners and music itself.

On Brands and Branding

Branding is currently the dominant paradigm in the marketing of commodities and consumer services (Levine 2003: 1). Historically speaking, from livestock to barrels of wine, the brand – literally a mark burned into the surface of the object – has traditionally signified ownership (Safire 2005: 20). During the mid to late nineteenth century, marketers of household commodities began to brand their products, setting them apart from the non-descript items filling up stores. Modern iterations of the term, however, extend far beyond ownership or distinction (see for example Aaker 1996; Ries 1998; Jackson 2003). Brands may distinguish products for marketers, but for consumers, they distinguish product experience. Brands stand out because they are a symbol of guarantee, assuring customers of a certain level of quality (or, at least, familiarity) with each purchase. While the product is the commodity that consumers buy and use, the brand is a signature of recognition; a metonym for the ideas, essences and aspirations embodied in the product. A watch is a watch, but a Rolex is something special because of the associations it evokes for consumers.

Brands reveal themselves as a mixture of symbolic and physical attributes: “a name and a logo, joined to a set of regimented associations, with source-identifying indexicals” (Moore: 339). Brands only truly exist in the minds of consumers, but they do so as a result of a series of cues, of “regimented associations” that are created by marketers, advertisers and of course, the consumer’s own experience with the product: a process known as branding. Take Holt’s (2004) explanation of the process:

Consider a new product that a company has just introduced. Although the product has a name, a trademark, a logo, unique packaging and perhaps other unique design features – all aspects that we intuitively think of as the brand – the brand does not yet truly exist. Names, logos and designs are the material markers of the brand. Because the product does not yet have a history, however, these markers are empty. They are devoid of meaning (3).

Even as symbols, brands are still rooted in materiality; connected to real structures, practices and processes. Branding occurs as a product’s material markers fill up. Advertisements, product placement in films, product reviews etc. all serve to brand the product: “Over time, ideas about the product accumulate and fill the brand markers with meaning. A brand is formed” (3).

The process is, of course, far from neutral many useful and necessary criticisms have been made of brands and branding. Most stem from Marx’s idea of commodity “fetishism”, and his puzzlement at how we endow the commodity with “transcendent” and “mysterious” qualities when commodities are, at their core, nothing more than products of human labour (321). Naomi Klein (Klein 2000) has provided the most recent and most popular take down of brands. She reminds us that brands are merely images constructed by:

a group of people sitting around a table trying to conjure up an ideal image; they toss around words like “free,” “independent,” “rugged,” “comfortable,” “intelligent,” “hip.” Then they set out to find real-world ways to embody those ideas and attributes… (157)

Klein’s argument provides evidence for Marx’s idea of fetishism. The mystery behind commodified products is in many cases a boardroom construction. A shoe is no longer a shoe to protect our feet, but a Nike shoe to make us better athletes.

Like most critiques on the topic, Klein’s attack is not just against brand but also against capitalism. While critiques of this nature are important, they gloss over the specifics of branding and ignore the impact on specific practices (in my case, the practice of making music). Turning to current popular music scholarship, Keith Negus (1992; 1999) has been the most concerned with dissecting the business of music marketing. Negus (1992) defines the brand, more narrowly than I do, as “the unique quality of an act [that] would become instantly recognizable and condensed into a specific image which could become a trademark” (71). Drawing on Dyer (1991), Negus discusses how artists must be considered “across a ‘total star text’ of musical recordings, videos, magazine interviews, concert appearances album covers and advertisements” (73). Creating these materials is largely a function of a record label’s marketing department. Artists/recordings are not spontaneous texts that arise organically, but rather they are carefully constructed (62). It is not simply songs that sell; image, logo, name, video and press are all crucial parts of consuming music.

Culture Production Systems and Product Meaning

The framework I used for my case studies draws from Elizabeth Hirschman’s (1986) work on the cultural industries production process. Her “culture production systems” (327) consists of three subsystems: the creative, managerial and communication subsystems. Her model describes how, where and when meaning is ascribed to cultural products, and although Fig. 1 seems relatively production focused, her model does allows for consumer agency; meaning is a negotiation at each of these levels as well as with the consumer.

(from Hirschman 1986)

Using this model, I compiled 4 case studies of the marketing materials and other brand attributes associated with the launch of 4 albums: Keane’s Hopes and Fears, Radiohead’s Kid A, U2’s HTDAAB, and Wilco’s YHF. Each case focuses on attributes that I believe reflect the most common and pervasive points of contact with the bands: sound, CD packaging, videos, websites and album reviews. For the creative subsystem, I examine the sound and style of one song from each band through musical analysis. At the managerial level, I provide descriptive analyses for CD packaging, music videos, and official websites. Finally, my review of the communication subsystem considers formal press (from music magazine and newspapers) and informal consumer reviews (from Amazon.ca) of the albums. The case of Radiohead’s Kid A is summarized below.

Radiohead and Kid A– The Avant-Garde Anti-Corporate Anti-Brand

Radiohead’s case is an interesting one but complicated one. Their brand, like any, is difficult to assess using only one album, Kid A, as an example. The album falls three years after Ok Computer, which was, and is still, heralded as one of the best rock albums of all time (Smith 2000: 10). The intensive touring and press junkets in support of Ok Computer, and the pressure surrounding the follow-up album, caused a near meltdown in the band.

Three long years later, Radiohead delivered Kid A, an album that is as much a reaction to the experience of wearing the “World’s Greatest Band” moniker as it is anything else. As a result, Kid A is a different album. More importantly, the marketing for this album was also significantly different than previous Radiohead albums and indeed most other popular music albums. Although I cannot discuss all the details here, I hope to provide a brief overview of some of the key elements of the album and its marketing.

The Creative Subsystem – “Idioteque”

The first feature that strikes one listening to “Idioteque” is the driving, electronic, drumbeat (listen to Appendix 2), which is more reminiscent of a dance club than a rock arena. The song’s length, (along with many others on the album) makes half of the album un-playable at most radio stations. The lyrics are relatively abstract poetic fragments and the images they evoke are apocalyptic in nature; “bunkers”, “ice age”, “women and children first” all suggest some impending disaster. “Idioteque’s” sonic and lyrical attributes reveal an interest in new instruments and new means of making music for Radiohead. Heavily reliant on electronic sounds and non-traditional rock instruments (e.g. horns, Ondes-Martenot, etc.), Kid A leaves behind most of the qualities that made Radiohead famous.

The Managerial Subsystem – Packaging, Video and Web

The foreboding barren-ness of the lyrics is evident in the album’s packaging. There are no band photos here, and no text, save for the production credits and copyright. The layout of the CD sleeve is complex; folds within folds need to be opened in order to view the artwork that adorns both sides of each page. Early releases of the CD also came with a second, hidden booklet (located behind the plastic tray that holds the disc) that featured cryptic anti-corporate/anti-consumerist text and violent hand drawn scribbles. These packaging elements not only link to the sounds on the CD but they reinforce the experience that Radiohead creates through their website.

Whereas most band sites feature links to band photos, biography, discography and audio/video downloads, Radiohead.com is a maze of confusion to the uninitiated

Taking full advantage of hypertext and the infinite space the web provides, Radiohead’s website defies cohesion. If there is a “point” to the site, the band shares it on a splash page for Kid A: “www.radiohead.com – as useful as a chocolate fireguard™” (Radiohead.com). Like the complex folds of the CD, there are so many links that one can get lost easily and frequently during any one visit. The site is filled with cryptic writing and artwork and even though the site offers a “store”, the difficulty in finding the merchandise (which they wink-ingly label, waste) and indeed any other concrete information makes it seem as if Radiohead does not actually want to sell you anything. The abstract maze that is their official site plays an integral part in branding Radiohead despite (or perhaps, as a result of) its attempts to defy the conventions of a typical band site.

This attitude is reinforced in the “videos” accompanying Kid A. Though no traditional music videos accompanied the release of the album, Radiohead released a series of animated “blips”. The 15-20 second clips featured images (many from Kid A’s packaging or website) cut to various sounds from the album. The blips share the ominous tones of the CD artwork. They also share a similar end shot, that of a menacing teddy bear (see Fig. 6), which recalls the CD booklets and the website. Relative to how music videos are normally presented, the avant-garde and challenging nature of the video blips, both in form and in content, mirrors the difficulties presented by the artwork, lyrics and music of Kid A.

The Communication Subsystem – Reviews of Radiohead

Critics generally have a tough time describing Kid A. The complexity of the album is usually seen as a good thing though some see it as purposefully obtrusive: “they’re giving their core constituency the biggest, warmest recorded go-fuck-yourself in recent memory” (Wolk: 73). Almost all critics note the lack of guitars and the muted vocals of Thom Yorke (the two attributes that the band has arguably built its fame upon). Reviews also focus on the anti-corporate elements of the album and the band’s anti-marketing strategy. Consumer reviews of the album (from Amazon.ca) are similar in tone and content though some find Kid A shallow and fake and suggest that “how much you’ll like it depends on how well you tolerate pretentious art” (Acustomer, May 26, 2004). The majority of the reviews however, whether they are in favour or dismissive of Kid A, tend to reproduce the brand discourse that was formed at the managerial subsystem.

Summary

After the pressures of Ok Computer, Radiohead responded by creating an unexpected album and marketing it atypically. Kid A is difficult in both a good and bad sense as it is not what Radiohead fans are used to hearing. From the hidden booklet to the cryptic lyrics to the labyrinthian website, it’s as if the point of Kid A, and its associated marketing materials, is to get lost in the folds. By refusing to make traditional music videos, refusing to pre-release radio singles, or doing very little touring to support the album, Radiohead created an air of mystery and intrigue that became an important statement about the band’s attitude. Far from a lack of marketing, Kid A’s anti-marketing said an enormous amount about the Radiohead brand. Radiohead comes across not as a brand, but as an anti-brand; an avant-garde group of musical pioneers who define genres rather than adhere to them.

Discussion

Building The Artist Brand –The Creative, Managerial and Communication Subsystems

An important, though perhaps slightly obvious, conclusion is that the model of the “brand” most certainly applies in the music industry. For music, all the various marketing elements work together to brand the artist. This is the process I have circled around during this analysis and it is likely best described as “artist branding”. Understanding the artist-brand, much like Negus’ and Dyer’s idea of the “total star text” (73), allows us to consider the musician’s primary text (i.e. the music) in context (i.e. how the music is presented to consumers). From a methodological standpoint then, brands make for unique research objects. Brands point us toward both political economy and cultural studies perspectives and require reflection on production and consumption aspects of cultural products. The brand is the nexus of multiple processes.

Although artist branding can be regarded as the attempts by industry to shape consumer reactions to any given product, this view is somewhat reductive. This analysis shows that the creation and maintenance of a brand is a negotiation between musicians, marketers, critics and ultimately, consumers that takes place at each sublevel of Hirschman’s “Culture Production System” model. Before artists turn their product over for mass distribution, the instruments they use, their sound, style, and attitude – and their willingness to change or defend these attributes – define the brand stories that can be told about them (Jones 2003: 150). The sound of an album forms the core feature upon which other brand elements are built. Here, such things as musical style, tone and other production elements play an important role in shaping the eventual brand. While marketing is often considered to be the extra-textual elements of a given product, an important result of my research is the need to realize and analyze the interplay between sonic attributes and the marketing elements. In some cases one drives the other. In many cases, the two are so intertwined it is difficult to separate them.

Once at the managerial level, however, artists undergo the more familiar processes that ultimately affect their brand. Here, marketing elements, for efficiency and impact, are generally styled such that they can be integrated across the various media in which the band is presented. Finally, the importance of the communication system in the brand building process cannot be underestimated. More so for the cultural industries than for other products, I believe the role reviewers and critics play in creating awareness and directing the discourse of a particular film, album, play is crucial. Music is a difficult thing to describe. Reviewers vocalize consumers’ experiences with albums and thus affect the way an artist becomes branded. That being said, reviews of the albums examined here seem to support rather than contradict the brand attributes seen in other marketing elements. Although reviews can, in some instances, expand artist brands by adding adjectives and ideas that can come to define the band over time, they generally leave most brand attributes unquestioned. Perhaps most interestingly, even negative reviews tend to reinforce brand attributes. Critics who don’t like Radiohead’s Kid A still allude to its relative “anti-corporate” nature and reinforce other brand attributes.

Expectations and Creativity

With respect to the impact of artist brands, the most significant effect is that the construction of a brand results in the creation of expectations within the minds of consumers. Negus (1999) makes similar claims with respect to the idea of genre, but I believe my analysis adds to this by showing how individual marketing elements can shape the ways listeners approach a given artist. Brands work, at some level, because they are a promise. But they are also labels that come to define the boundaries and possibilities of products. For some musicians this creates a tension. Expectations may ultimately be detrimental for the band’s creativity. Once a brand image has been created, artists may be expected to live up to it and provide listeners with an experience they deem fits with previous brand interactions. Even Radiohead, whose sounds and marketing materials lend them the image of ever-involving and ever-experimenting musicians, had difficulties getting everyone to accept the mysterious sounds and marketing methods of Kid A. This may ultimately affect the type of music artists can create. In this lengthy but telling interview excerpt, Radiohead’s bassist explains:

‘I think, as long as you keep moving, you’re all right,’ he said. ‘The thing is you’re always developing and expanding. It’s a protean thing and a public image can’t keep pace with it. So it - the process of success - is like this slow-drying glue that sets around you, that slows you down and gums you up. And while all that’s happening, your own life’s going on at the side of it, with your own relationships and your own experiences and that becomes sort of calcified as well. And the whole thing just grinds to a halt really. And then you suddenly find yourself in the paper or on the cover of a magazine and your life and experiences have become summarized. And once it’s summarized, it’s over. So the trick is to try to be in the corner of people’s vision, but not full on.’(Greenwood qtd. in Smith 2000: 10)

Once the band is summarized into a brand, movement is restricted. Music making and public image are not necessarily in time with each other. Brands can limit the chances musicians take; they can calcify the creative process and trap artists.

The brand thus reveals itself as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, artists need a well-defined brand identity that is marketable and easily communicable for success. Part of the reason consumers are attracted to brands is because they know that a Big Mac from McDonald’s tastes the same regardless of where in the world they decide to indulge in the signature burger. On the other hand, artists like Radiohead also need the freedom to explore their own musical abilities; regardless of wherever this may lead. Radiohead may not have wanted to release the exact same album as Ok Computer but the success of their follow-up album hinged on their ability to provide fans with a Radiohead experience, and this continues to be the case each time consumers invest in the band. Artist brands are thus expected to evolve their product enough to keep it interesting while maintaining the overall experience listeners expect and rely on.

Artist Brands and Standardization

The traditional explanation for cohesive marketing strategies in the music industry is that success in the music industry is a rare and risky venture; relying on already successful brands or on popular brand images helps mitigate the risk for record companies. If a company is successful with a particular brand image (say Britney Spears or Coldplay), me-too imitation brands (Christina Aguilera or Keane) are sure to follow (much like in the world of packaged goods). The fear here is that the marketing needs of an album begin to drive its very content. Record companies do not sign bands because they enjoy them. They choose bands they believe have a marketable product and image. A band’s marketability is inextricably linked to the ability of record companies, and to some extent audiences, to define what the band is about, whom they can be marketed to, and importantly, how much that market is worth. If record companies can slot artists into pre-determined brand images that they think will sell, this limits the amount of risk companies are taking with the actual music itself. Obviously, for the cases I examined, it was necessary to take this argument with a grain of salt. Radiohead, in many people’s eyes, could hardly be considered an example of a “standardized” cultural product. In fact, Radiohead likely had enough clout from their previous successes to afford them a relative amount of control with respect to the marketing of their brand. In an attempt to mirror the musical decisions they made on Kid A, they developed an alternative (some might say challenging) marketing strategy. Their video blips lasted only 20 sec. and showed no pictures of the band. Their website was equally obtuse. For critics and consumers, this gives the impression of an anti-corporate anti-brand. But that type of stance/attitude is not ultimately detrimental for the marketers and record companies responsible for the album. At most, it represents a new marketing challenge. As the CEO for Capitol records relayed:

Spin [magazine] said I probably peed my pants when I heard Radiohead wouldn’t be making a video […] But frankly, I’ve spent most of my career dealing with creative artists, so I took their decision as a given. I thought ‘OK, here’s our challenge: Let’s figure out a way to make people aware of the album regardless’ (Roy Lott, qtd. in Siegler: 80).

Far from simply “making people aware of the album”, Radiohead and their marketing team were able to build anticipation for the album and communicate attributes about the band that emphasized their musical choices. In this case, the “brand” becomes something that is acknowledged and necessary, but must never become too explicit. The brand message needs to get out, but never so strongly as to appear inauthentic or contrary to the broader assumptions that accompany the rock genre.

Fin

The act of consuming music is integrally linked to the act of consuming music brands.

The creative, managerial and communication subsystems work in tandem with listener experiences to create artist brands. Most analyses in the area tend to focus on the role of the managerial subsystem, but I hope this analysis shows that the creative and communication subsystems also play important roles in shaping the brand. Production values, sonic attributes and musical style form the base layers upon which other brand attributes are built. The communication subsystem then interprets these and in doing so contributes to the overall brand image. Although my conclusions paint a relatively negative picture of brands in the music industry, branding does afford artists some control over their own image. Even the limited information available on the marketing strategies I examined reveals that bands exert varying amounts of control over the marketing process, be it on account of their status or their foresight. The idea of control is probably best viewed as a continuum between brands that are artist-driven versus those that are imposed upon the band by external sources (e.g. the record label, band manager, etc.). Arguably, artists in control of their branding will be less likely to be misrepresented than artists who are simply subjected to the process. This conclusion is all the more topical today, one week after a new American Idol was crowned and one month before a new episode of Rock Star kicks off. Reality television shows such as these lay bare the amount of fabrication that occurs behind the scenes. They are as much about building the brand of the eventual winner as it is about who the actual winner is. Artists today are just as likely to “be made” as they are to make it. When Idols get off the show, they have an intimate connection with thousands of fans before they’ve even sung a note of their own music. They’ve been pre-marketed in a way that most artists can only dream of. Unfortunately, these artists are rarely in control of their own brand image. Their musical talents and skills are secondary to the process of achieving fame and/or success. They are an exercise in branding, but an exercise that is controlled by marketing managers and the show’s producers. As we move towards newer modes of acquiring and distributing music products (I’m thinking of the growth in digital music), artists can potentially exert increasing control over their brands. Hopefully, a proper understanding and control of their brands will help artists, whether they are selling art or plastic.

Works Cited

Aaker, David A. 1996. Building Strong Brands. New York: Free Press.

Amazon.ca. 2005. Radiohead Kid A - Customer Reviews 2005 [cited May 28, 2005]. Available from http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/music/B00004XONN/customer-reviews/qid=1121289928/sr=1-4/ref=sr_1_3_4/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/702-1074231-0361669.

Dyer, Richard. 1991. A Star is Born and the Construction of Authenticity. In Stardom: Industry of Desire, edited by C. Gledhill. New York: Routledge.

Hirschman, Elizabeth C. 1986. The Creation o