Problem

Although music was, and still is, an essential part of daily life and the backbone of spiritual, cultural and kinship beliefs, we don’t often hear it on our radio stations. Many indigenous musicians have been mistreated in the music industry in the past over cultural-appropriation concerns as well as copyright issues. It is also more difficult for an indigenous musician to get recognized because of the atypical contents of their music.

Strategy

Other than traditional music, we also recognize that there is a new culture of contemporary indigenous music that has a wide appeal to listeners of various music genres. The fusion of traditional indigenous music with modern music styles creates a space in which the artists can express their tradition and history, as well as to reach a wider range of audiences in Canada. We plan on incorporating this new movement in music into our project to attract a younger audience and aid upcoming artists in getting recognition.

Solution

Joyce and I came up with an educational website that lets the user listen to the music of indigenous origin that suits their usual specific taste in music. On each artist’s page which is customizable to artists, we have a “behind the songs” section that will give each artist the opportunity to share the meanings of their songs as well as some autobiographical stories about their heritage and how it’s affected them and their music. We had some difficulty coming up with an engaging hook that would get the youth to use the website but after some brainstorming, we came up with a pretty appealing solution. We were playing around with the word “silent” and realized that it had the same letters in it as the word “listen”. So, we took that to our advantage and created a dramatic intro to the website as well as the foundation of our social media campaign. Joyce and I thought that the best media to reach young people was Instagram which is why we decided to make compelling “stories” (which could also be used as paid ads) and a well-curated Instagram account.

• 

• 

Self-Evaluation

8/10: I had fun learning about the Indigenous culture while doing research for this project. I think I could’ve done a better job executing this project if we had a bit more critiques and work time during class. But doing the blanket exercise was very helpful as well as getting feedback from Bracken.