In keeping with our concept of presenting a feminist ideology and challenging hegemonic patriarchal notions, I wanted to create an identity for our hypothetical artist in a way that would coincide well with, and amplify, the messages our music promotion package would embody.
I suggested that we should give our artist a stage name that highlights themes of asserting your identity as a woman and Esha, thankfully, liked my name suggestion:
The stage name of our artist, Mrs Midas, is an intertextual reference to the ancient Greek myth of King Midas who could turn anything to gold by touching it—something that became a sort of curse for him. Carol Ann Duffy’s retelling of this story from the female perspective embodies a sense of autonomy that women in myths are often deprived of, thus giving the name “Mrs Midas” an air of empowerment.
The representation of our artist as a woman who hopes to dismantle the patriarchal structures might be appreciated by our target audience, a lot of whom are teens/young adults who expressed their dislike of the objectification of women in music videos.
I thought it would be interesting to urge audiences to think of the artist as someone well-read, something we highlighted through several instances of literary intertextuality. This would particularly attract readers and those who perceive alternative/indie artists as ones which make more "nuanced" art compared to mainstream artists. Keeping this in mind, I decided that we should a social media post (specifically Instagram stories) about the books that inspired our hypothetical album, antinarrative. Esha created a template for it on Canva to which I added the content:
This idea was prompted by my research regarding another alt/indie group, Florence and the Machine, which has also previously posted about literary inspirations to promote their albums, e.g. the following is a promotional post for Dance Fever by F+TM:
Importantly, giving our artist a stage name also coincides with alternative/indie conventions, as a lot of artists within these genres use stage names and personas to build their star image around. Some examples of this include:
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