R+P Post 10: Album covers that have inspired and influenced my ideas

Album covers are an important part of promoting the artist's image and showing something about what sort music the artist makes. The three main things that a debit album cover need to do are; show the genre; attract attention; and connote artist identity/image.

For our album cover, we wanted to have a colourful theme as our music video and artist also follow this theme of colour and vibrancy. We looked at AlunaGeorge's album covers to see what their current style is and then we looked at other artists' album covers to get our ideas for our own. I think album covers are important because they allow for the artist's image to come across the audience clearly based on what images get selected for the cover. They also allow for synergy between the artist's cover, website, social media, etc. as they will follow the same themes, colours and ideas.

Example of AlunaGeorge's album covers

Aluna and George both feature on their album covers, it isn't just Aluna (the main singer) as one might expect, so this is something we want to take ideas from and put both of our artists that make up the group on our album cover.

However, these albums covers are quite monotonous in terms of colour and don't have the eye-catching appeal that we want to incorporate in ours. We will focus more on the vibrancy of the cover and making sure that the colours are synergistic with everything else that we create.

A couple of the album covers of other artist's are; Lily Allen 'The Fear' and Kanye West 'Graduation'.

Both of these album covers are bright and eye-catching. Lily Allen's (left) shows Lily sitting on the 'A' which gives us inspiration as to how we can position our girl and boy in a unique way. Kanye West's (right) makes use of animation and random images which make the album interesting to look at. The soft purple and pink colours influence our ideas as our artist is more skewed towards a femal target audience and these are traditionally girly colours. We chose both a UK artist and an American artist to see the albums portrayed any differences in their music culture, but neither album has direct reference to their country's music scene. Lily Allen has music of the snythpop genre and so her album cover is more an influence to us as our chosen track is also synthpop/electro. The album cover is quite simple and not jammed with different images which is something we will take influence from, so that our artist can clearly be seen and all the attention is on them, although it will be a catchy album cover overall.

We've jotted some of these ideas down in a notebook that we made at the beginning of our research + planning phase.

After having researched album covers, we discovered that some of the conventional features are:

• artist name and album name
• institutional information (e.g. record label and logo)
• consistent colour scheme that is synergistic with artist's other platforms
• link to artist website and contacts
• promo sticker (e.g. parent advisory or 2 for 1 offer)
• focal image either abstract or photograph)

We will aim to include all of these conventions when performing our task which is to create a 4 pannel digipack for our album cover.

R+P Post 9: Music videos that have inspired and influenced my ideas

We looked at lots of music videos to gain inspiration for our own and one that we particularly liked, and reference a lot in our research + planning, is 'BLK & BLU' by Chase and Status.

   

This video is our main reference point as it has the same theme of narrative that we want to incorporate in our own. The hand held camera adds a gritty feel to the video and reflects the real lives of teenagers/students. We want our video to have the same indie and gritty and indie feel to it, although ours will also include performance to make it more interesting and add a new layer of meaning to it, e.g. the performance will focus on lip syncing the lyrics whilst the narrative acts it out.

           

The outfits they use in the video (seen in clip above) are something we are inspired by as they follow the current trends in youth fashion, using brands such as Dolce and Gabbana and American Apparel which are very popular. Also, the lighting used in the pub scene (seen in clip below) creates a colourful neon glow which is something we might try and experiment with as it sets up a dance atmosphere and our video will be all about colour.

           

We noticed that Sigmund Freud's theory of voyeurism can be applied to 'BLK & BLU' as the audience watches the girls getting ready in the mirror. The theory is developed by Andrew Goodwin when he states that female performers are often objectified in this light, seen in Chase and Status' video as the females are wearing clothing that could be viewed as provocative. Voyeurism could potentially be related to our music video as well as we will include shots of our protagonist getting ready, possibly using mirror shots, to portray the message that she doesn't care what people think of her and will wear what she likes.

Nicki Minaj's 'Super Bass' video is another video that inspired us, but this time it was the performance aspect that we were interested in. The artist has wild make up and hair which is something we want to give our artist as it represents her wild nature and crazy attitude to life.

Finally, we also looked at Estelle's 'American Boy' and liked the use of split screen in the studio and thought that we could use a split screen of the girl and boy in the studio for our music video.

R+P Post 8: Possible tracks for the single

The mains tracks we looked at were of the electro genre with an interesting instrumental as this was the genre we agreed on from the start. The tracks also had to be a sung by a female artist because our group is made up of girls and we wanted one of us to be the lead in our music video.

The first track we discovered is called 'What If I Go' by Mura Masa.

  

 Positives:

- synthpop genre of music (a lot of Mura Masa's songs are electro-pop)
- reaches a climax in the song which allows for us to have a climax in our music video
- singer is from the UK which matches the UK image of our artist

Negatives:

- song is repetitive
- the video is what drew us towards the song rather than the music itself
- lyrics can be hard to decipher which means it would be hard for our audience to understand directs links in our video to the lyrics

The next track we were interested in is called 'Sleepless' by Flume (ft. Jezzabell Doran)

  

Positives:

- nice beat for a montage sequence
- electro beat really stands out so the genre would be obvious to our target audience
- upbeat and feel-good

Negatives:

- lack of lyrics so couldn't do a lot of studio based performance
- repetitive, possibly not a very memorable song
- doesn't have any links to UK music culture

R+P Post 7: Record labels of interest

The record label that our group are interesting in using for our artist, is a label that AlunaGeorge is already in partnership with: Island Records. It is UK based and is a division of Universal Music Group. Island Records have a particular focus on the progressive UK music scene which makes it the perfect label for our artist as Electropop is a new, upcoming music genre which gains popularity by the day.

It is important to be signed to a record label that understands your music and supports your image as they ultimately have control over the marketing and distribution of new albums and singles. Island Records UK is the perfect label for our artist and chosen track because it will have insight into what is successful in current UK music culture and will be able to push our artist in the right direction in terms of music trends and image.


Another record label that seems appealing is 'Relentless Records' which is a branch of Sony Music UK. It focuses on new artists with "distinct, creative talent" which is ideal for our artist as they are new on the UK music scene and so would work well with an "independently minded' label that could help them get their music out there.

This label has also released Artful Dodger's main track 'Re Rewind' which has done really well and is a part of the UK garage genre. This means that Relentless Records are established with the UK music scene.

R+P Post 6: Currrent trends in Popular Music

Popular music trends can be seen by looking at the charts and which songs come in the top 10 - this indicates what music is appealing to the widest audience at the moment and which genres are the most successful.

This is a section of an article written on popular music - 'International Trends in  Popular Music' by Pekka Gronow

I then went on to look at the Official Singles Chart Top 100 website to see which songs are in the top 10 and if there is any similarities between these song.

Music Chart

Although these songs don't all fall under one genre, they are all upbeat songs which shows that audiences are more into feel goof songs right now, rather than ballads or slow songs. It also shows that Major Lazer and DJ Snake are in the top 10, which are two artists that our audience said they liked when we asked them. This proves that our song choice will be popular.

R+P Post 5: The kind of music video I would like to make

The idea we have in mind for our music video is a mixture of narrative and performance, with the narrative aspect being shot on location in London and the performance aspect taking place in the studio. The narrative will have a gritty feel to it and will be shot on a hand held camera in order to maker the shots seem more real and less staged. 'BLK & BLU' by Chase and Status which is one of our reference points is shot on a hand held camera throughout and this appealed to us as we felt it was more relatable.




GIF from YouTube video 'Stay High'

Another music video we looked at is called 'Habits (Stay High)' by Tove Lo which is all narrative based and follows a girl through her life and her bad habits such as going out partying all the time. We used this as one of our reference points because it frequently shows the girls face in the middle of the shot with the background changing behind her which is an idea we wanted to use in our video.



GIF of the groups music video

Our music video will follow the lives of two people in a relationship and how the girl wants to break free from anything that is restricting her. An idea that we have is for the couple to have an argument at the beginning, leading to the girl running off into central London. In a previous year, and A2 media group made a music video with similar ideas to what we have, the main one being that it follows a relationship.



R+P Post 4: Audience groups of interest

Our target audience is a young audience, specifically people aged 16-25. We also will tailor more towards girls as when we asked people of our age what music they're into, it was mostly girls that specifically enjoyed listening to synthpop and electronic music. We held a short interview with a 17 year old female called Flora Cox about her taste in music and her music consumption. This can be seen below.

Some of the artists that our target audience seemed to like are:

• Chase and Status
• Craig David
• Artful Dodger
• Ms. Dynamite
• Disclosure
• DJ Snake
• Major Lazer

All of these artists either fall under the electronic or UK garage genre, which gives us the confirmation that our choice of song and genre is going to be popular with our target audience .