This is a good advertisement for the band Mumford and Son’s
album ‘Sigh no more’. It uses the band’s house style font and a very simple but
effective layout that hints at the band’s music genre with the field location
that is repeated. Being an advert for the CD, it does not use an image of the
Digipak cover or attempt to repeat it, but is confident in the band’s name and image
enough that the user will know who it is and be able to find the album alright.
The black and white is very classical and matches the italic title and vintage corners
of the squares – the minimalism is modern and yet old at the same time, which I
think reflects the cross-genre nature of indie-folk. It also means that the
poster appeals to a wide audience of both young, modern teenagers and the
slightly older generation. This is something my poster will need to do, in
order to reach the broad audience easy-listening has.
The slightly angled photographs along with the way the band
members are sat in a field gives them a slightly roguish representation, though
a very gentle one. The shots are almost like old photo album shots in their not
precise composition and lighting, whilst also giving a feeling of camera
movement – they could very easily be imagined as shots taken from a music
video, a link which I think could work well in our artists’ case. For an
unknown artist, repeating motifs such as imagery used in the music video will
help build a recognisable image. In Mumford and Sons’ case, they already have a
strong costume code and font style. We will have to build one that is
synergetic across all different promotional media. The use of a quote from a
well-known media institution NME also works well to encourage people to buy the
album – the magazine is dedicated to a wide range of genres and so would also be
an appropriate place for a album advert or poster to situated, where it could
reach a large audience of music fans.
Another example of promotional media we could potentially
use to sell our new artist would be tour date posters – which conventionally
are in the same vein as album advertisements, but more often use photographs or
imagery of the band playing, crowds or instruments to give the feeling of a
live performance. For the acoustic genre, simplicity seems to be the main code,
with striking images being more important to grab attention than big names or
bright colours – something that has bled over from the indie music scene: there
is such a wealth of artists and media around in the 21st Century,
all artists have to create something as individual and unique as possible to
grab any kind of attention. This extends to any feature in magazine double page
spreads, performances on live TV, or even advertisements for their album on the
television. These in particular tend to extend out of the album cover’s design,
and focus on one or two well-known songs that will encourage people to buy the
album to hear and then fall in love with the rest of the album. Unfortunately,
with the rise of iTunes, this does not occur as often, with people merely
buying the song they like off of an album and leaving the rest. Creating
content for iTunes users is therefore a good idea – free digital booklets are
becoming popular that can only be accessed if you buy the entire album. These
commonly read like the inserts of an album with photographs, track listings,
lyrics, musical credits and the occasional quote/anecdote on how the music came
about. Being a relatively new technology, it is definitely something for new
bands to consider.
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