Test shots for our digipack

We did a photoshoot for our album cover. Our aim for the photoshoot was to get photos that represent Eleanor, as being innocent, yet edgy as this will relate to her being the 'girl next door'. For this purpose, we dressed her in normal day to day clothes as this fits in with our casual theme and correlates with our target audience.Firstly we started doing portrait photos as this is generic in most album covers. We then decided to take 'caught in the moment' pictures in which Eleanor was laughing and looking content - exactly the image we are looking to portray in our music video. We carried out our photoshoot by renting out the cameras from our school and using the music studio to shoot Eleanor against a black screen to ensure the pictures were clear, as well as allowing our viewers to not get distracted by the background.

Research Into Merchandise By Similar Artists

Another stream of revenue for artists is merchandise which fans can buy through the artist's website. Artists make and sell merchandise because in music in the online age, they are receiving less money from single sales and music sales due to the emergence of streaming so need to find other ways of making money. Merchandise is a good way of doing this because it can enable fans to outwardly show their support for the artist and the merchandise may not cost that much to produce.In order to understand what merchandise we should put on our website, I have looked at Lana Del Rey, Banks and Lyyky Li.

LANA DEL REY-

LIKKI LI-

BANKS-

Common things sold alongside music included t-shirts, hats, posters, CD covers and mugs. These items are very simple, with only a picture of the artist or the album cover and maybe the artists name. They also use colours which are not particularly bright. This is important in helping present their star image as the simplicity of these items highlights the simplicity of the alternative/ indie artist and the lack of bright colours and basic design helps to connote their organic nature.

When creating the merchandise for Eleanor, we should consider the type of product we are going to sell, keeping them basic. We should also ensure that the design is simple and that we use simple colours. This will all help to not only connect with our fans and bring in another stream of revenue but also may help to enforce our star image through the presentation of these products.

Key conventions of artists websites

How we are selling our artist

The future is with the crowd in the cloud

In the 21st century, it is vital for artists to connect directly with their fans, build a following on social media, and it is no longer the sole domain of record companies to market artists and help build their following. Artists now need to connect with fans via social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter etc. This helps new artists as it now as much about building your profile as it is building your music. As Mike Masnick states, you need to connect with fans to give them a reason to pay. 

We have done this by creating various social media pages such as on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat etc. We also launched her music on different streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music.

Research into tour locations

Our artist Eleanor, is a new upcoming artist, therefore, research is needed to look into similar artists who are also on the same platform as her. 

Location for an artist who is up coming

- Smaller size 

- Locations need to be geographically align. For example, if artist was performing in Edinburgh it would not be sensible to travel to Brighton the next day as this would be a very long journey. 

Locations: 

1) O2 Academy Edinburgh - Glasgow

2) Barrowlands - Glasgow

3) The Cluny - Newcastle Upon Tyne

4) Ledmill - Sheffield 

5) Rock City - Nottingham

6) Sunflower Lounge Birmingham - Birmingham 

7) O2 Academy Birmingham - Birmingham 

This is going to be the route that Eleanor is going to take on her Tour in the United Kingdom. This is a good route because they are all geographically aligned and each location is not too far from one another. Therefore, Eleanor will not have to travel too far between each one. To plan even further, we made sure to look at accommodation for Eleanor, so she will ensure a good indication as to where she can stay when she goes there. 

The reason behind these locations is because these are a couple of the major cities in England and has good small scale venues that many up

Website Analysis

Drafting the website

When considering the design and layout for the website for our band, there were a few things we had to take into consideration. First we had to decide where and how we would make this website, in terms of whether we'd use a program or an online web designer. We narrowed our choice down to the two creation sites weebly.com and wix.com. We chose these two as our media teacher highly recommend them, as well as members within our group having previous experience. It seems most likely that wix will be the design site used as this is the preferred choice of the two members who will be designing the website. Aerin and I feel most comfortable with six and so this is where the website will be made.

In terms of the colour scheme, our initial idea is to use a colour scheme that features the colours of greys, blacks and possibly a white or black colour for the font, we chose these colours to correlate with the main element behind our song, due to the fact that similar artists have the same colour schemes with the same target audience as ours. As well as sounding futuristic. The reason for these colours is that they complement each other well. We have also toyed around with the idea of using black or white font, or using a combination of both. We have taken inspiration for the colour schemes from websites of artists such as; Lana Del Rey.

These websites also contain similar fonts to what we wish to use. We have drafted several ideas for fonts, however some look indie and alternative which doesn't match the genre of our artist. Some of the fonts we have drafted include "Times New Roman", "Crime Times Six", "Alien Encounter", "Avatar Bold", "Bobcat", "Farray", "Avenir", "Manorly", "Anton", "SWTOR Trajan", "Chinyen".