Bring Music to the Masses, Austin Style
Adam Cherian and Kaitlyn Wilkes
It felt like a boss came in and slammed papers on our desks demanding the following: “make reporting shows easier.” Even though that is what we pitched, being presented with the weight of actually executing the plan feels like an uphill battle. However, both Kaitlyn and I work in music media and can put our brains together to make something work.
First we had to agree on a priority, what do we want to focus our energy on when it comes to music? We decided that local acts will be our main focus, and the promotion of them. With that we wanted to go deeper, what was really important to us? Austin is a wildly diverse city with a rich music history, and recently there have been a lot of reports of musicians leaving due to rising costs of living. That is when we decided that our ultimate goal for the project would be to figure out a way to promote musical and cultural diversity within the local artists sphere. The specific design question is as follows:
How do we get listeners to listen to local musicians to increase arts engagement in the community?
We got to brainstorming possible solutions, and the storm was a clear sky because nothing was coming down. Difficult is not even a word that exaggerates enough how hard it is to do what we’re doing. Local acts are already hard enough to promote (a lot of them have trouble doing it themselves), what would a product that serves to promote them even look like?
One thing that we constantly went to was create a separate publication that focuses on local artists: the issue is that that already exists. An idea that Kaitlyn had was creating an index of local artists in the area to reference. Another idea that was had was to create a newsletter that promotes local artists.
Whatever solutions that we come to, this is just the infancy stage. There is still a lot to work on and we can’t wait to see how it turns out!
