Ariana Grande and Olivia Rodrigo the 2 artists that I will research to deepen my understanding of artist branding.
Brand serves the purpose to create a distinct identity of yourself. This could be reflected via music style, values, and life story and to build connection and consistency over time. Artists aims to create: Visual identity, How to communicate with their audience, consistency between their music and image, finally, grow and evolve shows the artist’s development in their career.
Ariana Grande is an influential figure in the popular music industry, specifically in the genre of R&B and pop. She is a songwriter and actress brought her to fame by playing Nickelodeon in Cat Valentine. Her confident and outgoing personality has shaped her as an engaging performer showcasing her powerful vocal range and ability. Also, actively being responsive and engaging with her fans on social media platforms.
Main successful albums:
2013–2015: Yours Truly and My Everything
2015–2017: Dangerous Woman
2018–2019: Sweetener and Thank U, Next
2020-2023: Positions
The album Positions features a dramatic shift in her style from being ‘sugar sweet’ in her earlier career and now takes on an experimental, R&B-influenced edge. Even the lyrics and the album hold more blatantly sexual undertones.
Her music reflects love in many albums. She targets audience around the age of 13-21. Creating content that are relatable and accepted by her listeners. She writes about love in many forms:
the challenges of relationships
the importance of self-love.
Example 1:
She use innovative ways of creating product for her audience. For example, the tune of ‘7 Rings’ sampled the iconic song “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music. She took advantage of using a tune that is already familiar and popular in the industry and recreated. The new version made a huge success as it gives a new flavor to the song by blending a R&B style and recreating a musical classic in the pop music industry.
Example 2:
Ariana has her own website (https://www.arianagrande.com) that promotes her albums for physical purchase and has links to her Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and her music on Apple and Spotify.
Style & Aesthetics:
Overall, her aesthetics in style is often vintage-inspired with a mix of streetwear and high fashion. As she became famous in the early years of her career, Grande was present at more public events and premieres. This allowed her to showcase many outfits that were more sophisticated.
In the late 2013, Grande wore a lot of miniskirts paired with a top, floral dresses inspired by the 50s and neutral colours such as light pink, black, white and beige.
According to Barthe’s semiotics theory, image construct connotations and they polyvalent. For instance, from Grande’s shift in style, she aims to create a diverse self to her audience by trying new things as she rose to fame. Her iconic combination: high pony-tail and over-size hoodie connotates elements of maturity and sexiness while retaining her original cute and sweet style.
Social Media
She is also very active and influential on social media platforms, especially Instagram as she is the most followed woman on the platform.
“Some marketing rules are meant to broken, as long as there's a level of strategy involved.”
Grande's strategy combines listening to her fans and giving the people exactly what they want while most of the others tried to ensure the content's always engaging and post selectively. She promotes teaser campaigns of her albums or videos that she’s about to drop which led to a huge influence with “Thank U, Next” as the most watched music video on YouTube within 24 hours of its release. As Hesmondhalgh argued media products produced are all profit driven. This approach’s was designed to attract more listeners, and intentional to maximise profit by pre-establishing her product and therefore minimise risk, keep the audience intrigued before she releases her star product (the album/video).
Olivia Rodrigo is an American singer-songwriter and actress. The song “Get Him Back!” is from her second studio album ‘GUTS’. This album draw influence from rock and pop rock style, featuring a subject of Rodrigo’s hardship experience from being an adolescent to adult. She rose to fame from being characters in Disney television (Bizaardvark & High School Musical) and was recognized by the audience. Her music breakthrough was in 2021 when she co-wrote the single ‘Drivers License’ with the producer Dan Nigro. The song broke Spotify’s record of twice for most daily streams ever for a non-holiday song. Her style she writes are often in the genre of ballads and pop rock, and she claims she idolizes Taylor Swift and give interpolation credit to her.
Her fashion style depicts vintage elements, vibrant colours symbolizing youth, livelihood and uniqueness.
She creates high quality music that is liked among young listeners. Her lyrics writing are easily relatable and are often around love, self-love and complex emotions. Furthermore, she is active and expressive on social media, post images that related to music, events, and her personal life; portraying an person who pursues their passions.
Promoting and self-branding her
After releasing “Drivers license,” Rodrigo proceeded to post a now-viral TikTok asking followers to stream her track. The video features the song and a series of video vignettes explaining its significance. She targeted the Gen Z TikTok creators in this promotional content while using features such as greenscreen in TikTok to make herself relatable to her listeners.
She collaborated with Apple to produce a music video of ‘get him back!’ that was filmed entirely using the new iPhone 15 that targeted a larger audience group.
As a whole, the album ‘Sour’, was a huge success. Rodrigo provided ideas and direction design and visuals of the cover art and ‘Sour’ photoshoot. The color palette had a sweet nature, with a bright purple backdrop and featuring Rodrigo with her face (and tongue) decorated with a rainbow of stickers.
Visuals themselves were also a huge part of the rollout for “Drivers License” and “Sour.” Despite the album’s title, the color palette of its accompanying art had a sweet nature, with a bright purple backdrop and featuring Rodrigo with her face and tongue decorated with a rainbow of stickers. In addition for her album packaging, she wanted to create a ‘zine’ feel which are self-published works usually created in a small team that has texts and images, usually reproduced via a copy machine. Like a collage style, she assembled pieces of elements of photos and stickers and made it like a DIY product. Rodrigo herself was not only heavily involved in writing her own music, but was in the process of creating her music videos, social media posts and events too. As a result, she is recognised with her ability to relate to teenage girls, therefore, attracting a particular group of fans.
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