This is a coalition of pictures that I would like to emulate for my website, whether it would be for the album cover, a single cover, the gallery or just for the background. I think that these images fit the brand identity of my artist.
I will do this by:
using a colour palette of bright neon colours and black
adding grain/ 'glitch effects'
This will help create the 'retro' look that these pictures embody.
The Weeknd is an artist of the pop genre, as well as the R&B genre, and therefore his music fits into the 'head' of Chris Anderson's Long tail theory. Nevertheless, I still feel that his website is appropriate to emulate for my own ancillary product. To do this, I will include:
Links to artist's social media sites
Links to stream/buy songs
Links to store where merchandise and music is sold
Embedded videos of music videos, performances .etc.
Chris Anderson summarised the Long tail theory by stating:
"Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from the focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward a huge number of niches in the tail. In an era without constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare."
Amazon is a prime example of long tail in action; without the limitations of physical space, Amazon are able to sell an extremely large range of niche products, and these niche products, collectively, bring in just as much revenue as the best selling products.
In terms of the music industry, the internet and online media has allowed psychographics such as explorers to fulfil their niche interests e.g buying vinyl online. This also adheres to Bulmer and Katz's idea that audiences consume media for uses and gratification in their, 'Uses and Gratifications' theory'.
The genre of my music video is distant from the mainstream fare, thus if it were to be uploaded to YouTube, it would be part of the 'tail' in the amount of traffic and views that it would receive in comparison to the 'head' where the most viewed music videos would be positioned. On iTunes, it would also be part of the 'tail' in the number of sales, but collectively, with other songs belonging to niche genres, would have the same number of sales as the best selling song.
Here is some of the feedback that I received after showing what I had created so far for my music video to an audience outside of my focus group, that are well versed in the Kpop genre. One of the audience members stated that my music video resembles that of another Kpop group's music video, (Kard's, 'I dont Recall'), a group that I had referenced in my treatment.
Due to the digital nature of the Korean music industry, I couldn't find any magazine posters for a digipack, as most of their marketing is achieved through online social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. Furthermore, as a technique to increase physical album sales, kpop albums are packaged in a more creative way, as well as including extra merchandise like photo books and photocards: a video of this can be seen here.
Therefore, for my research on Digipacks, I am going to carry out textual analyses on a range of different products to identify the codes and conventions of digipacks and kpop albums (which will hopefully enable me to create a professional looking kpop digipack).
As I am unable to find kpop album posters specifically for magazines, I am going to textual analyses of kpop album posters and album posters for magazines- again to identify the codes and conventions so that I am able to create a professional looking magazine album poster.
Kpop albums usually consist of:
An album sleeve which acts as the front and back cover of the album
A photobook- this contains photos of the band members from photoshoots which fit the concept of the album, credits and lyrics.
One or more photocards- these are usually signed selfies of the idol members.
While I started to edit my footage for the first verse, I realised that the footage I had available was very limited in terms of diversity i.e (cutaways, different scenes and compositions). This can result in a less engaging piece of text, especially for a music video. To avoid this, i'm going to attempt to film some more shots (in particular; cutaway shots), to use in the first verse.
Today, after having uploaded all of my footage and importing it into iMovie, I commenced the editing process for my music video. Whilst editing, I constantly referred to my storyboard, however I feel as if I am going to change the 'narrative' that I initially intended to create in order to fit the pace of the song.
