As the music industry has evolved, Motive Unknown has developed an artist services offering that brings significantly more power back to the artist and ensures they can operate in the most efficient manner possible.
We do this by fully auditing an artist’s presence online, before rolling out an improved ecosystem that connects up all aspects of the artist’s career. We firmly believe data should be centralised around the artist to empower them as much as possible, and we are specialists in making that happen.
Our work with artists touches on all or some of the areas below. We are completely flexible in the approach we take to allow us to work within the artist's existing structure, or to help them create a new one.
Strategy & Planning
Motive Unknown bring many years of experience to help you build business and marketing strategies that are right for your unique setup. We have worked with a huge variety of artists in the past, and thrive on scenarios where we can help artists who want to think differently.
MU x Moby
We brokered a deal with mindfulness app Calm to make Moby the first artist ever to have his work featured on the platform. Doing so made Moby's Long Ambients 2 album the only commercial album on the app, at the time used by over 45 million people. The success of this led to Calm creating an in-house music team which continues to thrive to this day.
CRM & Owned Platforms
We strongly believe that taking back control of your rights and career should also mean taking ownership of the connection with your fanbase.
Music marketing has been too focused on third party platforms that limit access to your core fans. There is a very important place for social media and streaming platforms in your marketing mix, but driving core fans into places where you can own the connection is vital.
To this end, we often advocate for artists to focus on building websites, CRM, email, membership communities and more into the centre of their campaigns.
MU x Underworld
We helped build a new web presence and CRM system for Underworld around their DRIFT Series 1 project and arena tour, enabling them to drive this hugely ambitious project on their own terms.
Ecommerce
A natural progression - and benefit - of owning this fan relationship is the ability to sell directly and drive revenue. We can work with you every step of the way, from choosing the right partners and getting a best-in-class technical setup in place, to executing campaigns that drive provable, direct return on investment.
MU x Robbie Williams
We worked with Robbie Williams management team to plan and run all marketing for his Christmas number one album, The Christmas Present, designing the marketing campaign to leverage the potential of Robbie's CRM programme and ecommerce store to drive an unusually high percentage of D2C album sales and higher margins for the artist.
Data Management & Paid Marketing
We firmly believe data should be centralised around the artist to empower them as much as possible, and we are specialists in making that happen.
We often plan and execute paid marketing campaigns that work across an artist's whole business, internationally. These cover music campaigns, direct ecommerce, live and beyond.
With all data centralised within artist-owned accounts we can provide complete transparency, and can use data far more effectively than in the usual siloed approach to music marketing.
MU x Run The Jewels
"Motive Unknown provides us with both the backend brain trust and front-end management for our digital initiatives, and help us navigate a digital ecosystem that’s expanding rapidly, both in scale & complexity." - Amaechi Uzoigwe (Manager, El-P, co-manager, Run The Jewels)
Social Media Organisation & Planning
We do not handle social media management in the traditional sense, purely because experience has taught us that the best and most effective social strategy is to have someone much closer to the band work closely with the artist to deliver the best and most authentic content possible.
What we do work on however, is facilitating the organisation and planning of social media content and posts. To that end we have created our own social media planner which allows both artist and manager to see posts on a calendar schedule, as well as approve all posting prior to it going live. We are also able to advise on the best content to use, and when to use it.