I have conducted research into similar digipacks of the genre to determine what kind of style our album artwork is likely to be. There are two types of album artwork that my group and I could pursue one is a photo shoot style album cover as seen below:
There is also a concept art approach that we could take, this would involve designing the covers and creating a concept as can be seen below:
There are a few things that must be included, on either the front of back cover of the digipack of our band, these are as follows:
Front: Name of band (biggest on the cover), name of album, parental advisory (if needed)
Back: Legal info, numbered track list, barcode
As can be seen, the strokes an indie/rock band whose genre is very similar to my groups band. In this collection of front covers there is no imagery of the band all of them are concept art. This shows how their focus is on selling the music instead of the band members themselves. As we follow the same genre as this band and the album we are releasing is the debut album, therefore it is likely that we will not use a photo shoot based on this example. Moreover, we have not found who our front man is within the band, this may not necessarily be the lead singer as in some bands such as ACDC the guitarist is the main performance or front man that can help to sell the band. Therefore so keep things open in the future we will just use concept art.
A example of the back of an digipack from the same genre is as follows:
This is the back cover of one of the Strokes album digipak, as can be seen it continues the scheme of the bottom left front over above. It is very plane and gives of a utopian feel as its almost selling the experience of the music. The song list is not pronounced and does not stand out it is very understated and just their for the purpose of the consumer knowing the song list. This is also concept art and not a photoshoot.
Above is a very early album of the arctic monkeys. This is useful as we will be releasing a band's debut album so looking into early work of now established bands is key into understanding how they marketed themselves. They use a photoshoot image of what we assume to be the band in the front cover this is likely to be positive as it gives the audience a sense of what the band are like and their star-image, this would have been especially useful especially without the prominence and accessibility to technology at the time of release, the band are not that accessible thus having them like this on the front gives the audience an nice introduction.
The back cover uses art to create a cool logo like font of the bands name and a very informal un-numbered track list. The track list also is not even as not all of the songs are lines up on the left-hand margin. This reflects the genre as there is no real path to follow as indie is about forming your own path and almost values creating a subculture of sorts that is different from the mainstream. Therefore by not adhering to the majority of conventions associated with album artwork they are displaying the genre.
As our video, will have a dark theme with hectic and busy undertones this relates to the pace and tone of the song. As the album is not reflective of one song on the album, we will not use this as our main theme for the album artwork. We will have elements of the video that link to the cover such as an urban setting for example. I feel that the artwork will be more concept art then photoshoot although it may contain photo elements to it. Furthermore, the album front cover will not have the band members on it yet as we want to keep our options open for future releases when we can know more about how the audience react to certain band members in order to further market the products.
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