🟪⬛ 01: Shorten your bio to one paragraph in 30 minutes
Position your brand
It all starts with music. But the moment you decide to become an artist - next to being a musician - your brand becomes important. That’s why we kick off with a branding assignment.
Today: Shorten your bio to one paragraph
Find your one most important brand association.
Write your pitch bio.
There are multiple types of biographies. Today we write your pitch bio that we will use during the Artist Lockdown Challenge.
The goal of this task is to position your artist's brand story. Let’s say I just discovered your music (we’ll cover that later this challenge). I’m with friends in a bar, so I can’t let them listen. I need a great story to talk about you and persuade my friends to follow you.
I call that story a pitch. It needs to be short and persuasive. So short, you can use it everywhere online. So persuasive, a marketeer for - let’s say - a venue that booked you can copy-paste this pitch to sell tickets.
The pitch has a standard format:
First sentence: Explain WHY you do what you do.
Find and describe your most important brand association. A brand is a summary of associations. Brands may evoke images of happiness, of fun, of wealthiness, while others you associate with being cheap or good value. What do you want people to associate with you? Is there a message in your music? What emotion do you want your music to appeal to?
Second sentence: Explain HOW you do that.
Describe how your actions contribute to your brand. If your brand is about happiness, explain how you let people achieve happiness.
Third and final sentence: Explain WHAT you do.
Describe what you deliver. For most artists it’s a description of their music genre.
To explain the concept of a pitch bio, an example:
Beyonce is here to inspire women (WHY) by empowering herself as a strong female icon in everything she does (HOW). Beyonce does that with her entertainment brand of music, live performances, movies and charity (WHAT).
That’s two sentences!
Don’t worry, it’s ok if your ‘WHY’ is something like “[artist] is here to let people dance”. It doesn’t have to be difficult. It has to be real.
Use your lyrics as inspiration for your why. If your music doesn't have lyrics, think back of the moment you created your composition.
Take your current bio, a black marker and start scratching. In this excercise, one of the most important things you’ll learn is what not to tell. Prioritise what’s important to tell new fans.
Ask the community on Discord for feedback. This is a difficult task. It’s recommended to ask your fellow challenge takers for a second opinion. A check makes it stronger. We create dedicated channels for each daily task.
- Carlo
🟪 Need help? Join us on Discord and get help from the Artist Lockdown Challenge community.
⬛️ Task done? We’re happy to share the results: tag @artistlockdownchallenge on Instagram and we’ll repost.
🟪⬛️ artistlockdownchallenge.com | @artistlockdownchallenge | discord