Question 2 Notes

Album Cover

Our MySpace

Video

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MySpace - Our MySpace serves as a hub for all our other marketing devices. It is a platform where the audience can interact with the band and find the video and any upcoming album releases. In our myspace we strove to move away from the traditional layout which many have grown tired of. In the last year, MySpace has suffered a huge emigration to the more clean and stylish Facebook, and our MySpace emulates that by moving away from messy html coding common on myspace.

We showcase our album cover, video and merchandise on the myspace, these are the key promotional elements to maximise album sales we and provide links to make the all important money. We have all the standard institutional pug and booking information.

We introduce the band with a biography concerning their musical background, and include individual pictures of each member to ease the viewer into familiarity with the band. Our biography is less about the band and more about their musical taste and style. This shows how Tear Down The Flagship are a band about the music and not about personality, as such with more Scopophilic examples found with Pop and R&B artists, which would feature more about the artist themselves.

We also use viral marketing in the form of a competition to design a t-shirt, this involves the fans and makes them feel more included in the band and makes their fandom seem valuable to the band, which is especially important in this genre.


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Album Cover - We glean on our name for our Digipak, using the nautical theme of 'Tear Down The Flagship' and having a wave like theme throughout. We also use dark blue/green colours for our fonts and backgrounds, which ties in with both the name and the genre, which often features dark mise-en-scene. We include an inside sleeve which has promotional and live pictures and information on the band in order to help the fans become familiar with the band.

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Links between the media - In our ancillary texts we have numerous links which make the combination of the products more effective. These include the naval theme, which stems from the band name, which is a stereotypical epic band name found in the genre and is found on the album art, which is echoed in the graphics on the myspace. This also includes the band logo, in its iconic font that appears to be eroded by the crushing waves of time. As a standard font on the page, we use a clear to read white sans serif typeface, and on the advertisement for the album we use the same font used for the track information on the cover itself to indicate the link between the media forms. The album cover builds on the things found in the myspace, and there are links back to the site.


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All in all, our video, MySpace and Digipak create a marketing package centred around the debut album. A typical audience member would be most likely to stumble upon the bands MySpace first, learning about the band and their music.

If still interested the viewer will be drawn to the Music Video, which appears on the page, which will provide more for the fan, if this is appealing, they may go so far as to purchase the video on iTunes or MSN Music.

This all combines towards the main product, which is the album, and the more deluxe Digipak. In today's world, your can download whole songs at the click of a button, and such the traditional hard copy album needs to provide something more for the fans.
Our Digipak is presented in an artistic design, and includes exclusive material, such as promotional pictures and more, and also has the video included in high quality. This makes the purchase more appealing, as it gives something back to the keen fan, which in our genre, Alternative Rock, is very important.

The combination of our products is effective to an extent. Our MySpace and Album Cover are very similar indeed, whereas the Video is not quite so similar to the other products, this could be a limiting factor when considering the effectiveness of the triad of products. However, due to the Video being for the hit single from the album, it could have more in common with a single release as is common in singles. If we had had time to make a digipak for just the single, perhaps we could have strengthened the similarities between the video and the single featured. We could have also spent more time thinking of clever marketing tricks and ways to reach our audience, in addition to our viral marketing campaign.

Despite this, I think we some amount of success in creating a effective marketing package.