Music Marketing Research

 For the first part of this project, we had to research a music production company and do 2 study cases about an artist/band. 

Our genre was selected randomized and we got pop. My group and I began to think about pop artist who have released music in the past 5 years until we came to an agreement of the artist/bands we were researching. 

I choose Ariana Grande (solo artist) and Katseye(girl group) both have worked with UMP which is the music production branch of Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) and one of the most known music production companies in the music industry. Many companies like Geffen Records represent UMP which produces Katseye. I started my research by learning about the history in music of my artist, group and company. It was interesting how Ariana Grande and Katseye are both different but have some things in common.

Ariana Grande became known and started her music career after her iconic role in a Nickelodeon show called Victorious. But she started working with UMP in 2015 and hasn't stopped since. Her last release was her 7th studio album Eternal Sunshine (2024).

However, Katseye is a girl group formed by a survival competition where they choose 6 girls to debut called Dream Academy, where the trainees had 2 years training and prepare to be pop stars. They tuned this competition into a Netflix show The Popstar academy. The girls were trained by using the K-pop system, but they have made different styles of music that fall into the pop genre. For the past year since their debut in 2024, they have become popular and are growing fast as a group.

With this research I came to the conclusion that both, Ariana Grande and Katseye utilize marketing techniques such as fan engaging to market their music/products, using the heavy influence of social media. Their audience is pretty much the same ranging from 15-25. For distribution, they mainly focus on streaming services like Spotify, Apple music and YouTube. Physical albums in vinyl and CDs can be found on major stores like Walmart, Target and Amazon.