Article analysis 1

Why Piracy is Perpetuating Plastic Pop
By Helienne Lindvall

Lindvall discusses her negative views on piracy and how unwilling people are to pay for music. Artists don't feel confident to fight against piracy due to previous failed attempts including Lars Ulrich getting a massive public backlash for suing Napster. Lily Allen also declared her view on piracy and how the revolution of it deprives most younger artists the chance to make a living out of it, but again there was a huge public backlash, including death threats aimed at her.
A point made by Noel Gallagher explains that the music industry is a business, so for it to be successful it has to be earning money by selling products created by artists. But the revolution of illegal downloading and piracy is causing profits to be minimised. This is coming to be a huge problem for the music industry and causing artist to seek other methods of revenue, such as extending the length of their tours.
Billy Corgan suggested that now people have the option to not pay for music, this has 'turned music culture into a service culture' and people are becoming to picky about the actual artist desiring a manufactured artist who is perfect in every aspect, when in reality all of the artist have flaws and the public cannot expect a 'conveyer belt of cookie-cutter pop stars'.
In terms of producing my own product, I don't not see a way of avoiding the problem of piracy, so I would focus on working around it in order to not let it damage income too drastically. I would have to manufacture the artist in order to create buzz and interest from the public so there are more encouraged to download the product legally. I would also focus on areas of being an artist which you cannot illegally download, such as touring and privet concerts in order to maximise revenue.

Goats

Lillian and I worked together to make humorous mash ups of well known music videos and clips of goats shrieking like people. Like other youtube users have done with various music videos such as Taylor Swifts 'I knew you were trouble':

We used windows movie maker to make the mash up. This was a pretty simple program where we had to initially upload our chosen video, which we decided would be Britney Spears' 'If you seek Amy'. We then chose places were a goat screaming would be funny and unexpected. We cut out the section where the goat should go, then replaced it with the goat.


We used a range of social networking sites to achieve maximum youtube hits. We posted a link to the video on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace in the hope that our friends/followers would watch the clip.
Unfortunately, when people tried to watch our video, they were shown this page:

So the video was taken down due to a breach of copy rights and we are not authorised to use Britney's video to create our own material. Although some of our classmates videos were not taken down, this is because different music companies have different policies and some companies see videos like this as beneficial to the song as people watch it, video it amusing and then are more likely to download the song. This is otherwise known as grassroots activity.
I really enjoyed this task and look forward to having another attempt at making a video like this and I hope it will not be banned as due to the copyright issue I did not get to see how successful our marketing plans worked.

Album cover analysis

Thriller poster ideas

After having a few tutorials on how to use Photoshop, we have now begun to develop ideas on making our own Photoshop creation. I want to make a poster for 'Sealed', I started brainstorming some ideas as to what deeper meanings or icons our thriller could have, for an example, I looked at the idea of the balled shoe laces, or the scarring of skin from ballet





Here are some of the ideas I begun to develop:

Here is my final creation. I chose the idea of using a piano as this touches on the classical element of the piece, this keeping the poster in sense with the genre. The addition of the ballerina shows that the film is about ballet, and the dirty background reveals this film will touch on the dark side of ballet. I used the 'magic wand' tool a lot to select parts of the image I disliked and remove them, so that my object of interest was standing alone. I changed the opacity as well as flow rate of the different images to make them look more realistic. The 'clone and copy' tool was very helpful in duplicating useful images and saving me time. Working with different layers and adjusting the settings of an image gave me a better understanding of Photoshop and helped me create a more interesting, unusual image.

Keith Negus - Organic & Synthertic ideologies

This is about different ways of promoting artists in the way they appear to the audience and how their career is developed to appeal to target audiences. Negus divides music acts into two parts:

• Organic acts
• Synthetic acts

Organic:-

The idea of an organic act has a more 'naturalistic' approach; their music is more pure and not manufactured by effects. Their success comes from themselves, and their image is a clear reflection of their actual personality, the record company only influence and tweek the act in order to increase audience appeal. The audience for an organic act are usually more sophisticated.

An example of an organic act is Adele:

Adele has a pure, natural, amazing voice, which is never enhanced by computer effects. She never tries to be someone she is not, and she doesn't give over the top extravagant performances, they usually consits of Adele, a mic and a piano. This way all the focus on the organic sound of her voice and her talent.
Below is Adele's performance at the Britt awards 2011 which is a prime example of her organic, simplistic, enjoyable style.

Synthetic:-
A synthetic act is more of a constructed act, an artist is created in a certain way that targets a particular audience. There music and style rarely matches their true personalities and their voices are often computer edited, hence they appear to be fake or synthetic. These kind of acts tend to be enjoyed by less sophisticated audiences like teens and young kids. The also focus more on single-sales as opposed to album-sales.

An example of a synthetic act is Will.i.am:

Will.i.am's music sounds both robotic and hugely edited, relying heavily on computer editing, changing the style of his voice in order to target a certain audience. He has been manufactured to appeal to the audience with unusual hairstyles and clothing. When in concert he makes a huge show to make the piece more thrilling and exciting and less about the music.
Below is Will.i.am performing on a chat show, you can see he puts on a big show with crazy lights and techno effects, making the performance synthetic.

Star Image

Music Campaigns

Now that the AS thriller course is done and dusted, we have begun to look at the A2 music video course and our first topic of interest is campaigns.
A campaign is an organised and structured series of elements designed around the same purpose. For an example, a public health campaign, like trying to get people to stop smoking:

A music campaign is a promotional campaign to launch a new artist. A successful music campaign will have high key performance indicator (KPI) statistics, these can be:

- Number of youtube hits
- Number of iTunes downloads
- Number of Twitter followers
- Number of CDs sold

These elements all help raise awareness about the band/artist so they become more popular

For an example, a music campaign that has been hugely successful is 'Baby' by Justin Bieber, the youtube video as over 860 million views, Bieber himself has 40 million twitter followers. This is a prime example of a triumphant music campaign.

Star Image

The band/artists themselves (the star) plays an important role in reaching the target audience and making the campaign successful. A star image is very carefully constructed in order to make them original and interesting, the image can be constructed through various elements such as the digipak, homepage videos and media appearences.

Some star images are created to be semi-mythological, to make them seem more unusal and mystical thus they are more appealing to the audience, for an example Lady Gaga, she has a beyond natural star image, with weird, abnormal styles, and she even has a male 'alter-ego'

She is aimed at and cosumed by as specific audience which is her fan base.