Album Art

In this coursework lesson we learnt went what onto album covers and what we would need to add to ours. We began by analysing album covers to see whether there was any correlation between them. We discovered many conventions such as:

• Band name
• Album names
• Picture of the band
• Parental Advisory 
• Synergistic type face
• Band logo 
• Record Label 
• Barcode
• Spine with name 
• Copyright
• Release date
• Promo code

As a class we then discussed how we then group different album covers. Some of the ideas that we came up with were:

• Colour
• Genre
• Digital format
• solo/band
• Style
• Debut or not
• Audience
• Influences
• Gender
• Mode
• Media

After analysing the reason for these conventions we began to question the purpose behind album covers and why are there so many correlations between them. A few reasons we came up with were:

• To promote the artist 
• Attract fans
• Iconic
• Make money 
• Entertain 
• Synergy
• To inform 

After that we presented our analyse of an album cover we chose. I analysed 'Stereo Typical" by "Rizzle Kicks'. This was there debut album so there artist identity needed to be strong to attract fans and become known within the industry.
The cover of the album is a picture of them. This clear image makes them clearly recognisable- this is a common convention of album covers. Throughout there whole campaign they use the same typeface. This then creates synergy between posters, t shirts and the album allowing them to be easily recognisable by their fans. The colour scheme is quite light using mainly pastel yellows and browns. This is because as a band they aren't very 'flashy' so the pale colour scheme allows the target audience to focus solely on the music rather than the bright/eye-catching album cover. The CD cover itself its just a picture of a pair of trainers and a packet of biscuits this makes them as a band very easily relatable to their target demographic which may encourage sales.

    

Artist Identity

In this coursework lesson we realised that as a consumer we don;t actually have as much control over the artist and music as we are led to believe. The character that the artist becomes is actually carefully constructed by the recording labels to appeal to certain demographics. During the lesson we were given the challenge to create our own artist from scratch. We were able to decided exactly how we, as a consumer, wanted our musician to look, dress, think ect...
The artist that we created was willow. She was 20 years old and was studying zoology at the University of Sydney. She was very inspiration to fans due to her simple ideologies and views.