Our student and artist Raven Grace Janicello explored the artist-entrepreneurship dilemma in the digital music industry. How do you navigate integrity and commerce in a single release campaign?
Artistic and creative research approaches are a unique feature of the M.A. International Management - Creative Leadership programme. Raven Grace Janicello explored the problem of the arts-vs-commerce dilemma which artist-entrepreneurs, specifically independent music practitioners of niche music genres, experience when trying to navigate through today's complex, algorithm-forced and commercial market-driven digital music industry when wanting to release their music for the first time, without letting it adversely influence and affect their artist integrity and creative intentions.
As an artist-entrepreneur herself, Raven conducted first-person, arts-based research with a practice-based approach in which she aimed to examine how digital music marketing theory could be tailored to her specific case, a self-produced and written three-track concept single called Loop within the genre of trip-hop, that would allow her to plan, produce, implement, measure, interpret, and optimize an accompanying digital single release campaign that balanced her artist integrity with satisfying the chosen trip-hop music market.
Therefore, Raven documented her step-by-step decision-making processes regarding the pre-production, production, and post-production stages of developing her single, a supporting promotional creative portfolio of various artefacts, and the digital single release campaign. She presented, assessed, and reflected on her choices and results from an artistic and marketing perspective to point out the opportunities and challenges that arose throughout her endeavour and indicate to what degree marketing has affected her artistic and creative process and caused an arts-vs-commerce dilemma in her case.
Her intentions with this research project were to contribute to the chosen problem of the arts-vs-commerce dilemma from a micro-perspective and, through her process, provide practical, valuable implications for other music practitioners and members of the independent music sector.
Visit Raven Grace's website | Listen to Raven Grace's trip-hop single Loop
Raven Grace Janicello, student in the M.A. International Management - Creative Leadership programme
