Synergy

Synergy comes from the Greek word that means work together. In media it is used to explain how different products can work together using the same concepts, for example, film soundtrack and video games.

Example of synergy was used in the film terminator 2, a guns and roses song “you could be mine” the result was that the song promoted the film and the film promoted the song.

Producer’s strategies

The music industry consists of many artists and performers working with varying levels of ambition and success.

Major record labels are usually owned by multinational corporations. Labels such as London, Island, and Polydor sign artists they think will have mass appeal and therefore make lot of money. They will look to use music videos as part of a wider marketing strategy that includes things such as radio play, press reviews, TV appearances and an expensive website. An example of a band that is signed with a major record label is 30 Seconds to Mars who are signed with EMI. You can see that EMI are a major record label from looking at a music video from 30 Seconds to Mars, such as This is War, which from watching you can see they spent a great deal of money on this video. If you watch the video you will see that the location of the video is set in the desert, which means that they would have to move all the equipment there to film which would make the video cost a great deal. Also in the video the band is in character of army men, so they need to use props such as the army gear and the guns etc. They also have to use a army vehicles, all of this would be too mush money for anything other than a major record label to afford.

Indie record labels, smaller independent record labels such as domino, have much smaller budgets and the artists they sign generally have more niche appeal. This means that the marketing strategy is different as they can’t rely on radio and TV for promotions. Music videos are used although they will be much lower budget and accessed mainly through the internet. An example of a band that is signed to an indie record label is The Xx, who're signed to Young Turks . You can tell that they're signed to an indie record label as the video hasn't had much money spent on it, using the song Crystalised as my example. The video is set out in a performance style, it is pretty much the band just performing on a stage, and that is the whole video. You can see in this video that this is all performed in a studio and would've been filmed in one day, this means that they would have to rent the studio for the day which would cost not too much. Also in the video, they used a projector to project things over the performers instead of a green screen, as it would have cost more to use one. Also in the video nothing special is happening, all it is, is the performers on a stage lip syncing to the words and playing the instruments, there are no special effects or expensive equipment used.

Self produced artists who self produce and are not signed to a record label tend not to have much of a budget for music videos. Their videos tend to be homemade and posted online receiving very few hits. An example of an artist that has become quite successful from self promotion is Charlie McDonnell, who posts music videos on youtube, he isn't signed with any record label and you can see this from his music videos. The reason that you can tell that this video is self promoting is because of many reasons, first of all, and most obvious is that he is simply in his room singing into a camera, all of the actual special effects, e.g. two of him are done in the post production. We can also tell that he is self promoting because of the natural lighting he is using and the fact that he isn't lip syncing, he is singing into the camera, not playing the same track over it.