The digital artefact in which I have created this semester is called Zuso Music, which is my own individual artist name and brand where I’ll be uploading and curating my own electronic music productions through using platforms such as Spotify, Apple music, SoundCloud etc.

Having already previously released content under this brand name, has allowed me to gain insights into my current audience, and tailor my music more towards their interests and listening history. Though particularly, since having started this as my BCM114 digital artefact, the response has been amazing. Not only have I been able to explore a different audience (that being the BCM students) but also, I have been able to develop my socials to a great extent, something in which I was very lazy about before starting the course. (See below)

This has also been reflective in my number of streams on Spotify:

In keeping in touch with my mood board and overall aesthetic, a lot of the posts and content I upload on Instagram vary. Particularly, a key feature in which I utilise to my own advantage is Instagram stories, as this is a great way for music artists to promote their works and direct people straight to your latest song or profile, by just tapping the image on display.

Additionally, I’ve also used this platform to my advantage in attempting to expand my already current audience and us it as a remediation. I’ve done this through engaging with fellow bcm114 students, as shown below whereby we initiated shutouts for both our pages, enabling both our brands to expand on our audience’s.

Though in terms of unpacking my audience and using this to my own benefit when producing my music, Spotify for artists is also a great platform which has provided me with very useful analytics into what my audience is engaging with and which tracks of mine they favour. The platform breaks this down by age, gender, geographic location, sources of stream and listening history.  

This feature has allowed me to thoroughly observe my audience, and tailor my production skills more towards them based off their playlists and current listening history. Having considered all these features and observed my most played tracks being Feel Better and Skies, (59,000 streams combined), has allowed me to better define my audience, and ideate my content towards them. Thus I did this, as to me it’s clear my audience mostly engages with the genres of future pop/future bass, I tested this by creating and prototyping one of my most recent works ‘Mindreader’, and tested this by gaining feedback on aspects such as the album cover design, including animations and clips of the track to gather peoples feedback and finally officially released it. (As shown below)

As shown, I’ve also used the twitter software to gain feedback on these aspects which has been beneficial for my development and DA. By utilising this approach to gain feedback, has allowed me to grow and develop my brand and understand my audience on a more personal level, thus is why I will continue to use this approach for the rest of my DA. As a whole, I’m continuing to love making the content I am producing and have a number of new ideas in which I’m really excited to try out. As I continue along with this digital artefact, I hope to bring more engaging content and learn more along the way.