Magazine Poster Research

Poster Analysis:

This analysis was done by another member of my group, they chose the band Panic at the Disco an alternative rock band. This is a good band/ poster to analyse as they are of a similar genre to B O C A (our chosen band). As you can see he has analysed every aspect of the poster; main image, main text, theme, layout and even its use of language relating it all to its target audience. This will allow us to create our own magazine poster advertising the band B O C A to the full extent of hooking our target audience.

Independent Musicians Research

Here is a post taken from Connor's blog:

During today's lesson, me and Arran went into some research on independent musicians and focused on what 'Indie' music actually is and how they distribute their music to the audience through digital copies and solid copies like Vinyls, CD's etc. 

Through the use of a helpful website called Bandcamp, we were able to discover a wide range of Indie artists and research their music to see how they present themselves to their audience as an independent artist. 

Funny enough, during research on the genre 'indie' me and Arran discovered that the word 'Indie' is actually another word for labeling someone as 'independent' as in someone who does everything themselves for the music which includes album artwork, record labels etc. Through discovering this, I have now come to realize that Indie is used in conjunction with another genre like rock to tell the audience that the audience basically did everything themselves. This can tell you a lot about how different an independent artist is compared to other artists that are partnered with large music companies like the big three.  

Going back onto the Bandcamp website, we discovered many artists from different genres that were all a good example of what an independent artist is. Some of these artists were called Hardwicke Circus, Barstow Bats, Sarah Grace, luciensghost. These all came from very different genres and were all on Band camp presenting their music, through Bandcamp they were able to advertise their albums, merchandise and artwork for anyone to view. Discovering this has shown how important small companies like Bandcamp are with getting independent artists the publicity and views they need from the audience in order to become successful. Having Bandcamp enabling independent artists to sell their merchandise directly online is also counted as a very important benefit in my opinion as having a good income can allow the artist to expand faster and expanding is a very important part when starting a music career.

I think the research that Connor and Arran found here will be very useful as we are promoting an independent band so could also use some of the websites discussed in the post. So overall we can use this information found to help promote our local band as it looks cheap and easy to use yet still enables a large scale target audience. 

18 Rated Music Video

 Arran create this music video to show an example of audience perception towards an extreme music video; which has recently become the only one rated an 18 by the BBFC.

As you can see my reaction is the worst, as i found it extremely shocking at times. However all of us at one point did laugh due to the randomness and over exaggeration of the violence. I thought some parts linked to the film Scary Movie, which is almost a parody of scary films.

From this we can take away the fact that we can't just include anything within our music video as then it may be certified and some of our target audience might not be able to view it.

Music Video Age Rating

Arran found this BBC article online (dated the 18th August) regarding new age ratings to be given to music videos to "protect children from viewing inappropriate videos on the internet". However, it has also stated that "International artists... won't be affected." because it will only apply to "music videos produced in the UK".

This means that if we are attempting to recreate a conventional music video, we need to be aware that these restrictions are in place, following the guidelines. However these are at the moment only for Sony, Universal and Warner music production companies, so won't affect an independent company; which is what we are.

Ofcom- Music Video Research

Here is a Powerpoint presentation of the information I found from the Ofcom website in a PDF file. I have read through the PDF and found everything on music videos and the rules of broadcasting. After that I simplified the information so that it is easy to understand and clearly highlights the main issues faced when creating and broadcasting a music video. Hopefully this presentation will allow the group to create and show a good music video but following the guidelines of Ofcom.

Ofcom music videos from Jammydodger97

YouTube Artist's Music Videos

Here is a video that Arran, one of my group members created to show the conventions of low budget YouTube music videos.

As you can see from those short clips, all the artists mix different camera shots on screen and it is only them performing due to the low budget. This is still very effective and significant as it allows layers and harmonies to develop as well as seeing multiple members of a band (Xplore Yesterday) on screen at once.

As we are not going to have money to spend on the creation of our music video we can take into account some of these conventions so that we can promote B O C A to their full potential; getting them known like these YouTube artists are now.

Types of Indie Rock Music Video- Analysis

B O C A Research

About the band:

B O C A as I have said is an independent Indie Rock band. They come from the Isle of Wight and have an EP recorded by (insert record label). They have also already created a Facebook Page, Twitter Page and Website for themselves. They have agreed to let us promote them and create their music video, Digipak and magazine poster. 

Band Members:

The members are Tom Batchelor, Charlie Nolan and Aled Harris. They are all 23-24 years of age and have been school friends since middle school. The band came together about a year ago but before then Tom Batchelor has been a part of three other bands that have now broken up. They all have there own careers along side playing their music together. 

Profile of Band Member:

Name: Tom Batchelor

Age: 23

Birthday: 10/02/1992

Band Role: Main Singer and Guitarist

Career: Naval Diver

Tom Batchelor wrote the lyrics to our chosen song "Elevator". He and his other band members decided to create the band as they all have a love for music especially Surf and Indie Rock genres. They started out playing on the local beaches with acoustics as it suited their style of music. They have gained more fans since and developed their music and have played at Platform 1 at the Isle of Wight festival and performed at the Bestival in a local tent. 

We as a group are thrilled to be promoting them further and producing this music video for them. 

B O C A

Our chosen artist is the three-piece band known as BOCA.
A local unsigned Island band, who's musical genre is indie-rock mixed with surf. We chose to create this bands music video, as where they are an unsigned band it would be a great opportunity to format a whole advertising campaign for them. As well as this they don't have their own music video already so we will not be influenced by watching this and can interpret the lyrics of they chosen song "Elevator" ourselves.

We can also start creating their own Digipak for their newly recorded EP and there own band poster incorporating images of the band such as these:

Taking it further we can include using social media to promote the product of B O C A. As they already have some pages on Facebook and Twitter we can easily post our own things to these sites of the work we are doing for the band and adapt the way some of their pages look to suit our advertising ideas.

So our group is going to formally email B O C A to gain permission to create their music video, digipak and poster; as well as gaining access to their social media sites and include them in everything we do so that they are pleased in the way we advertise them.

Because they are an indie rock band, we will now be focusing our research on the indie rock genre. This will allow us to apply the conventions that are shown in the music video of this genre.

UK Top 40- Record Labels/ Music Industry

Here is a short Radio Chart Show I created to show the record label companies of the UK Top 10. As you can pick up from listening, the majority of the record label companies that produce the top 10 are owned by Universal, Sony or Warner; these are part of the Big 4. We can also see that there are only some songs that use an independent company to help produce it. As well as this the main genre of all the top 10 songs are dance tracks.

Overall this took a couple of lessons to create, throughout the process there were some problems with the equipment. This has reminded me of some of the issues that can occur; so whilst planning our time for filming we needs to take this all into account and have a contingency plan. I used an audio recorder to create my speaking parts and I downloaded the music clips from the internet. I then uploaded them all to my computer and used Adobe Audition to edit each clip and made sure that the sound volume levels were even throughout. As well as this I used a fade in and fade out affect so that all the speaking parts could be heard over the top of the music tracks and everything flowed too.

Here is some further analysis of the Uk Top 15 done by Harry, a member of the group. As you can see there are some trends such as: Most of the artists are from the UK or USA, they are mainly males in the top 15. As well as this the main genre throughout this list seems to be pop/house music. All the artists are fairly young mainly being in their twenties. Also the majority are a recent artists having their active singing years late 2000's. This will help us in promoting an artist as we can see what is trending in today's music market and where there are gaps with certain genres.