SONY MUSIC

DESIGN INTERN

Feb 2023 - Apr 2023, Sep 2023 - Apr 2024 | Culver City, USA

From February 2023 to April 2023, and then again from September 2023 to April 2024, I spent 3 consecutive semesters working with the Epic Records team. My primary responsibilities include conducting digital media and trends research, creating visual assets and promotional materials for various artists, and tracking artist performance on social media virality charts. I use tools including Photoshop, SparkAR, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Figma.

Epic Records is one of the three major record labels owned by Sony Music Entertainment. Currently, it has signed a number of emerging and established artists, including Tyla, AG Club, Giveon, Future, Travis Scott, Zara Larsson, and Meghan Trainor. They are known for their avant-garde, edgy branding, which I was tasked throughout my internship to incorporate into digital assets.

VISUALS

One-sheets, digital assets, and motion graphics

MARKETING EPIC ARTISTS

In my first semester with Epic Records, I created and maintained 13 one-sheets used to market Epic Artists to potential collaborators over the course of 8 weeks.

The most important part of these one-sheets was finding an organized and concise way of helping someone quickly get to know an artist in a very visually "punchy" way. My goal was to catch the audience eye with edgy graphics right off the bat. I also had to ensure that I created assets that aligned with artists' individual branding and style.

MUSIC INDUSTRY SIGNALS RESEARCH

I started by brainstorming all the signals I could think of, informed by my experience at Sony. I thought about the future of music ownership, the place of immersive experiences in music marketing, and the emergence of social music sharing apps and data visualization experiences.

After my group mates and I shared our ideas, we began synthesizing and affinity clustering our signals into distinct themes. The general theme centered around the way music exists and connects people in digital spaces. We wanted to dive deeper into this topic.

Intrigued by the signals I encountered during my time at Sony Music, I continued my research into the future of music trends in my Masters program at UC Berkeley. I worked alongside 3 other students to dive deeper into the future of music, exploring everything from AI-generated music to music as a tool in pain therapy. We eventually narrowed down our research to music “fandom” and chose to interview Kpop fans as a case study.

Research Question:

What physical and digital spaces do K-Pop fans occupy and how do those interactions impact an individual’s sense of belonging?

We interviewed three young women in their 20s (details above) on their views of the Kpop Industry, and how they engage with other fans in physical versus digital spaces. To do so, we took the secondary research we’d conducted around music industry signals, and our and developed an interview guide and template for taking notes on each interview. We then categorized the questions and laid out everyone’s answers next to each other so that we could begin synthesizing our takeaways.

After getting to know more about fan behaviors, we gathered several key insights.

After speaking to fans and getting a better idea of what the current pain points and opportunity areas looked like in the world of Kpop, we realized that there was so much more to explore than just the physical and digital aspects of fandom. These aspects were deeply intertwined with para-social relationships, maturing and aging, spending behaviors, and music discovery.

Insights

For our final deliverable, we created a zine that documented our process from start to finish, including the insights we gleaned from our research. Flip through the zine below to see a visual representation of our work!