Ancillary Task - Album Artwork and Posters

When an artist releases new music, the way in which the artist is represented is crucial to how people see them and how well there music is understood. Each decision made about the appearance of the album and marketing of it is deliberate and is drastically influenced by the artists meta narrative. The design of the artists image helps promote their style of music, communicating to a prospective audience the sound and feel of what the artist has created. It serves as the best form of advertisement for new artists with debut albums and lets people know what's in store for them.

There are two main ways that this representation is created: through typography and iconography. Typography refers to typeface and font, or perhaps what some people would refer to as the bands "identity" or "logo", where as iconography refers to the style and representation of the artist through things related to imagery.

Album Artwork

This

On

Posters/Advertisements

This poster serves as both an advert for her two upcoming promotional shows and for the release of her debut album.

Research - Amanda Rogers and Record Companies

Amanda Rogers is mostly thought of as an independent artist - not just in her style but also in her production and marketing
She herself approaches record companies to distribute her music to audience's across the world, rather than being signed to one main distributer who undertakes everything for her. This is also shown through her website, on a link to part of her page where she designs album artwork for other independent groups and artists and her own. This way, she has complete control over all decisions, from creative to financial.
Some of the record labels she has distributed music with are:

2nd Records - Germany
Immigrant Sun Records - Brooklyn in New York
Make My Day Records - Europe
Do it Together records - USA


Immigrant Sun Records:

An Independent record label from New York (USA) that began in 1996 and disappeared in 2003. For this reason, not a lot is known about the company.

2nd Records:

This is a record label within Germany, they have been publishing music since 2000. In 2005, Amanda Rogers was touring as a support act, and heard about this record label as they were releasing her albums 'Something Borrowed, Something Blue' and 'Daily News'. This was so that her music can be broadened to a wider audience.


Make My Day Records:

Founded in 2002, they distribute from Europe,  something that counts towards widening Amandas audience range.

"Hope From the Forgotten Woods, is a 16 track album that was conceived of and written 3 years ago, during which time Amanda explored other musical ventures, and while these songs sat and simmered in her heart and mind, the story began to unfold - revealing more to Ms. Rogers about herself than she ever expected. Amanda is always sure to let the creative process happen to her rather than to make it happen, and so once this story unravelled, she spent night and day alone in the studio and recorded every spark just as it flowed into her, creating a dark and intimate sound scape that supports the confessions of a would-be serial killer full of pain, passion, vengeance, and liberation. Can you dream up an alternative ending to the story to help mend your broken soul and seek revenge on a wicked world without leaving the confines of your mind? Well, yes, with songs like "Get Your Heart", and "Ms. X" , Amanda's Hope From The Forgotten Woods has done just that."

         - From Make My Day Records Website


Do It Together Records:

Many of this record label's artists are self reliant and produce their own music independently. It consists of a promotional team and an industry network to help promote the artists and distribute the artists' music. This is the record label that the album 'Heartwood' was released with and therefore the company that had the most influence over our chosen track, "This Beauty".

Ancillary - Typography and Typeface

When designing our album cover, typeface was one of the things we had to be the most careful with. Our decision would influence the entire perception of our artist - a typefaces effect, although small and unnoticeable, really makes a difference. We had to come up with a balance between something that looked professional yet also hand written, to stick with the natural theme running throughout our music video and initial designs for the album artwork. Therefore, we decided to use a separate, hand designed font for Amanda's name. We wanted to make it appear as if the red thread seen in our video was used to create the title, further affirm the link between our video and the artwork.

This Beauty - Finished Music Video

And here it is... our finished video! We're all really proud of how it turned out and of how much our hard work paid off. I think it's clear now watching this just how understanding the conventions and styles of the genre impact the creation of music videos. We're now free to start the process of gathering audience feedback and opinions, and for this we started with the artist herself.

After letting her know of the completion of the project, she responded with this email:

This was fantastic news for us as a production group, as it felt as if all our efforts were finally validated and acknowledged, particularly since Amanda believes we have captured the meaning of the song so well. It makes me especially feel as if we have achieved what we set out to do in a way that stays true to the original artist. Our next step will be to use various methods of marketing to get the audience feedback we now require.

Typical Conventions of Our Music Video Genre

The genre of music video is greatly determined by the sound, style and genre of the song that is being portrayed, which means that to develop good music video, we need to understand and apply the conventions of our genre as fully so that they can become an integral part of our own products.

Amanda Rogers is one of those artists that is hard to pin down to a particular genre, but her style is easily spotted in some other artists videos. Therefore, we chose to stick to Indie videos with influences from Blues, Pop and Piano music as Amanda's main genre.

Conventions 

Mise-en-scene

• Often use of retro/vintage inspired clothing to reflect older influences of music and evoke an aged sound with a modern twist
• Natural Lighting is often favoured over artificially lit or particularly bright areas. 
• Use of instruments in music video 
• Exterior Locations (tends to be- this isn't a strict convention) 
• Sometimes vintage filters used- e.g. black and white, washed out colour etc.
• Not as wide a variety of settings used, generally 1,2 or maximum 3
• Similarly a limited number of costume changes
• Editing 
• Not a very fast editing pace (strictly depends on the song though) 
• When compared to other genres such as R+B for example, this genre doesn't shrink time as much. Of course, being a music video, the general convention is that generally time is shrunk in indie music videos, however not to a great extent as in other music perhaps. 

Camera

• Generally steady shots- when shaky cam used- not to great extent, tend to be of nature
• Slow panning shots, slow motion
• Close ups of artist to create identity
• Low angle shots, empowering artist

Ancillary - Cover Designs and Ideas

After drafting a few different interpretations of what our album artwork could look like, we set about combining the aspects of each that worked best to create the best cover we could. We had to consider the conventions of album artwork whilst making these decisions, along with the representation of our artist and most importantly, her music. Amanda has a very unique, independent style and therefore we had to capture this in the presentation of her music just as we had done in the music video we created for "This Beauty."
Below is a rough sketch of our finished design:

We aim to design this to ahigher standard on Photoshop at a later date, where we should be able to refine the font used for the word "Heartwood" and improve it's overall appearance. We discussed wanting to make the cover look very natural and handmade to reflect Amanda's style, but also to keep it looking professional and of a high standard. Amandas name is written in a unique font meant to emulate the "red string of fate" theme that runs throughout our video. depending on our final designs for the back cover and the inserts, this thread may continue from her name and run throught the album.

We had quite a few different ideas drawn up by seperate members of the group, each of them accuarately representing aspects of Amanda Rogers' artist identity but all focusing on different features that they saw within her style and music.

 

 

For each of these seperate ideas, we focused on bothe the typography of the font's used and the iconograohy. We decided as a group, with input from people who had watched our completed music video, that our most iconic feature in the video is the red heart and string, and the shot at the hand of the heart being held in our Amandas hands. For this reason, we felt that we had to include both of these in the album, if not on the front cover then at least inside or as a motif.

 

Along with this, we felt that even though conventions of album covers show that new, unknown artists tend to feature on the front covers to create conection between the music and artist, the connection of music and ideas was more important for us to focus on. it is for this reason that only one of the designs above shows Amanda, yet still mainly focuses on setting and location. The second idea was ruled out quickly, as whilst we felt it could reflect the artistic nature of Amandas work, it didn't fully represent the concept behind the album and "This Beauty".

 

Hopefully, with this idea in mind, the rest of the album design can now be based around it, along with the poster advertising the album in which the cover must be a prominent feature.



 

 

Marketing in the Music Industry

Today, marketing techniques have changed a great deal since the peak of the music industry in the mid twentieth century. In the digital age, marketing is nearly all done online since there are so many ways to reach the public and spread word quickly. In fact, because of the variety of artists emerging onto the scene, now more than ever is a chance to find new, niche music. 

There are a few types of marketing that are used by nearly all artists in all genres of music...

Posters - Nowadays these tend to be distributed in magazines, on-line newspapers and websites rather than distributed physically round an area- although many still opt for this method.

Promotional Gigs -Previously bands would tour areas, performing various songs from the album to be released and generate a hype up to and sometimes after the release date of their album. Nowadays, because of the large crowds and fan base sizes, these gigs tend to be at other live events. However, other more unusual methods still occur.  

Taylor Swift for example sent out an impromptu tweet advertising an unplanned performance on Hollywood Boulevard, New York to which thousands of fans turned up. The size of her fan base made this possible, but it still drew massive amounts of attention to her and her new music.

Radio - Many artists still get a significant amount of radio play before an album or single will be released to see how well the song plays

Some other methods of marketing include:

Social Networks- Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Soundcloud, Bandcamp are just a few.
Word of mouth/Viral campaigns
Adverts- TV advertising in particular, along with radio, magazine and online adverts showcased on websites.