Conventions Of A Digipack

layout
Their are many different ways in which a digipak should look. Digipaks within our genre are generally image based.

This is a day to remembers digipak for their album what separates me from you.


This is the front of the album. The inside of the digipak shows the aftermath of the image on the from cover.





Another band within our genre is enter shikari they also have a digipak for their album a flash flood of colours,with their digipak it is also mainly images showing the bands logo. It also includes a track list and a section telling you who the band are and what they do.
This is the digipak for blink 182's album take off your pants and jacket album. this digipak is a very minimalistic digipak which only includes images which are the different parts of the albums title.


From this I learnt more about what should be included in a digipak and what the layout and presentation of digipaks are in our genre of music.

Conventions Of A Band Website

Conventions of a band website

From this research we gained a good understanding of the basic features we should include in our bands website as we can compare to bands in similar genres 

Reaching Our Target Audience And How This Will Help Promote Our Band

Reaching our target audience and how this will help promote our band

We found out where local music shops are and distributed posters to advertise our band’s album, tours and merch.

We also looked into were bands similar to ours performed so we know where to organise gigs and were we would have the most luck getting people to look into our band and supporting them by going to their shows.

We created a facebook and twitter page to gain popularity or our band. We started off by getting friends that we knew to look at the band and share the Facebook page around to gain a wider target audience so we would have a wider knowledge of what areas had the largest amount of people that like our genre of music. We had our band create a blog were they can interact with their fans to allow them to influence were the band plays and how they want the band to be. This would help us reach the targets that our target audience wants.

We also tried to contact bands that had a larger following then ours to arrange tours to help the band because more widely know.

From our basic feedback we were able to design our band in a way that would catch the eye of people that are fans of our genre. This would help with finding the right target audience because we would be able to change anything that would be suggested by our new fans to make our band relatable to a wider variety of people.

Using what our target audience had told us we decided on our bands name being hope beyond hope. We decided on this because our target audience wanted a name that was easily remembered and would stand out from other bands making it easier to find them and easier for them to show their friends.

Our target audience also said that they wouldn't want to have to look through a blog of text from the band so we created a band YouTube page so the and can make videos of their tours and other things that they do as a band. This would also help promote our band because we would be able to title each video in a way that would mean that more people would see it and want to find out about the band.

We will also heavily market our band around the times of other artists releasing albums and tour dates to give us more chance of people seeing that we our releasing an album and checking it out along with our merch and tours.

Our target audience would also like to be able to learn and play the songs by our band. We would make this possible by creating tabs on music websites and creating video tutorials with the band. This would allow for people to find our bands music when looking for songs to learn and would hopefully come across our music and promote it by sharing it with friends. 

Video Star Power

A technique used by many bands is to incorporate celebrities or other music personalities within their videos, this is a useful way to gain attention within the music industry. In Limp Bizkit's Break Stuff while they aren't actually performing, the cameos include; Snoop Dog, Jonathan Davis front man of Korn, Dr. Dre, Eminem, Eminem's daughter Hailie, Pauly Shore, Seth Green and Flea of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers this makes the video to appeal to people who are into many genres of music from rap artists to chilli pepper fans.


Weezers Beverly Hills is also another example using Hugh Hefner and the Playboy Bunnies



Even stars as big as Elton John aren't above using stars in videos as proved by the 2001 I Want Love video which was Robert Downey Jrs first appearance in a piece of media post rehab



While we dont have stars to use this technique it is still one used in videos that is well worth mentioning when it comes to video success

Intertexual Video's

Blink 182's All The Small Things video is a classic example of a video with intertextual examples The music video for "All the Small Things" parodies contemporary pop videos. It features the trio doing parodies of other popular boy-bands such as The Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, and N Synch. The video also feature parodies of Britney Spears' "Sometimes", and Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a bottle" video.

Another video with intertextual features is Dani California by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers
This video is almost entirely intertextual references the band mainly did eras, not actual people: rockabilly, British Invasion, psychedelic, funk, glam, punk, Goth, hair metal and grunge. While the band's appearance was intentionally generic in each scene, obvious nods were made to certain specific artists, including Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Prince, Parliament-Funkadelic, David Bowie (as Flea was dressed like Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust persona), Sex Pistols, The Misfits' Glenn Danzig, Twisted Sister, Mötley Crüe, Nirvana and The Red Hot Chili Peppers themselves

These two videos are examples of songs that used intertextuality to gain stardom, both the videos are regarded as massive successes Dani California has almost 30 million views and All The Small Things has 55 million.

From the success in the intertextual videos we may take elements of intertextuality into our own video, not in the way that these videos do but possibly in more of a 'hat tip' way, acknowledging other videos and elements that come into other videos

Goodwins Theory

What Music Means To Me

Branding Of A Star/Band - Linkin Park

The bands most recent album 'Living Things' was along the same lines as 'A Thousand Suns' keeping with the same abstract themes and experimental rock 

The style of album cover also changed to fit the new branding  The new crisp font and presentation of the album was a bit step in changing the image of the band they was no longer a Nu Metal band with heavy riffs and screams but more a stadium rock band, selling out Wembley arena. And they was only a tour away from selling out the O2. 

   

The Branding of Linkin Park has changed massively since their first album dropped back in 2000.
The bands debut album 'Hybrid Theory' comes under the genres of Nu Metal & Alternative Metal which is very different to their latest offering  'Living Things' which falls under 'Electronic' the bands image has also changed massively.
  
This was the bands 2000 offering, keeping a hardcore/rap metal image with a gritty album cover that syncs up with their image along with the fonts of the album matching the bands image of a gritty, from the street, graffiti band.

Linkin Park - 2003

The band began its adaptations for its 2003 release of 'Meteora' taking steps towards alternative rock while maintaining its Nu Metal original positions in many ways. The branding of the band stayed much the same as not to discourage fans with their second release.
They maintained the general same image and album art work with the music starting to feel different preparing fans for the massive developments that were to come <-Meteora.
 Faint from album Meteora

The big changes began with the bands image, branding and music in 2007 with the band album Minutes To Midnight, with the exception of two tracks this album completely went away from the Nu Metal feel to a more alternative rock style. The branding began to change to adapt with the music style and the times, the roughed up look had gone from style and bands began to look more clean cut and dressed smarter. The picture to the left shows the band in 2007 dressed much sharper than in previous years. This style change was clear not just with Linkin Park but with the world of rock music.

It was no longer cool to be seen in shabby clothing as bands like Linkin Park, The Killers, Green Day, 30 Seconds to Mars and many more were showing, they changed to the times. The style change and the branding of the band also changed to fit then new style of music the music was cleaner and so was they.

 Minutes to Midnight and Shadow of the Day from the album

2010's album A Thousand Suns was another massive development for sound an image while keeping the same sharp look the band went in a whole new direction symbolized by the new abstract album cover.
The strangeness of the album cover was just a drop in the ocean for what fans could expect from the album, the album was so far from what the band once were the branding was so different, they'd also grown to the point that they was big enough not to even need a title on the album people would just recognize it much like Bring Me The Horizon's 2013 hit Semperamental. The new music would be a big change for the band and yet another one of their tracks was also now to be used in another Hollywood blockbuster: Transformers 2. The branding of the band was no rivaling Hollywood blockbusters in size as well as being used to promote video games like Medal of Honor who paid the band for the rights to the song Catalyst so that they could use to for their trailer before the albums release so that for people to hear the new song they had to watch the trailer.




The latest album stays much within the electronic area that they moved to.

Also a recent step back into the metal scene was announced when Linkin Park were announced as the Saturday headline act at Download 2014  playing the entirety of their first and heaviest album 

Study into music video timings

Performance - 2:17
Narrative - 1:59
Total time of lead singer (Simon Neil) on screen - 1:27



Performance -  1:53
Narrative - 1:52



Performance - 1:57
Narrative - 2:13

This research helps us understand the balance of timing in music videos of our genre
From this we can make the basis of our video and the timings of it, we also know the amount of time the band and the lead singer should spend on screen roughly to conform to our genre

Rock Video Genre Characteristics

The characteristics of a typical rock video consist of dark and edgy attitudes and clothing to create the desired atmosphere. The videos are often largely performance or a 50/50 split between performance and narrative with the greater focus being on the lead vocalist. The mise-en-scene is mostly dark to set the tone of the videos unless the band are purposefully going out of their way to create a comical video, something that is done often by bands like A Day To Remember, Limp Bizkit or Bowling for Soup.
The story lines of the videos tend to outline the dark lyrics and the editing is often fast paced to match the tempo of the song.
The videos I have looked at the come to these conclusions include;
Enter Shikari - Rat Race



Biffy Clyro - The Captain


Pierce The Veil - Caraphernelia

And more from various artists but I seem to be limited to how many embed codes I can put in one post

Mulvey's Theory

The three videos we looked at under Mulvey's male gaze theory were;

Kylie Minogue - Spinning Around



Scouting For Girls - She's So Lovely



Jennifer Lopez - On The Floor



Kylie's Spinning Around has factors that fit and subvert the male gaze theory. While the focus of the video stays on here figure and face for much of the video also showing the mens reaction to her she isn't just presented as an object for men she actually has a lot of control while being the center of attention, she leads men to the dance floor and maintains much of the control over the men, you feel like she could walk away from the men and they'd be left powerless to get her back.

Scouting For Girls' Shes So Lovely conforms heavily not just in the video but the lyrics also. A good demonstration of the lyrics fitting the theory is  “she’s flirty, turned 30, about the age a girl is really dirty” 
The video focuses heavily on the female starting at her feet and teasing its way up. She also seductively uses a straw for a prop at one point, heavily reinforcing that she is there for men to gawk at and purely for visual enjoyment. 

Lopez's On The Floor is very subversive she maintains almost all control representing a strong independent rich woman, she has a male driver  taking her to her destination showing his position in society is under her. How ever her costume consists of very little and still would leave her for the enjoyment of any onlooking males how ever intimidating she tried to be.