Question 4: In what ways does your product use, develop or challenge

forms and conventions of real media products?

By Jordan Page

When we were creating our media products it was important that we showed the influence of existing media products on our work. However, there were certain conventions that we wanted to subvert with our media product to make it stand out from products already in the market.

Digipak

A convention our product confirms to is the convention that women in Hip-Hop/R&B music are heavily made up in images. For example on our digipak, I edited extensive make up on our artist after look at artist such as Rihanna (inset), I found that a lot of the time in images females are wearing a lot of make up. This is because women in Hip-Hop/R&B music are presented as being attractive, sexual people. I followed this convention as it is followed by numerous popular females in Hip-Hop music and as I wanted our product to fit into the genre well and seem realistic and professional this convention was followed. Dramatic eyeliner and thick eyebrows are a common convention in photos of women in Hip-Hop so I made sure to embrace this and amplify it in our images.

Another convention that our product conforms to is the use of eye contact in images. The direct address the audience receives after looking directly into an artists eyes, conveys the image that the artist is personally addressing them and sharing contact with them. This was a convention we wanted our product to follow as it establishes our artist as being strong and confident, which is a common ideology of women in Hip-Hop music.

Another very important convention we wanted to follow in our digipak was theartist exploiting her wealth. We did this by making sure that our artist wore as muchjewelry as she could to convey the image that she’s wealthy. We wanted to this asit’s a common convention of women in Hip0Hop music to be wealthy and to treatthemselves to such expensive jewelry, for example inset you can see on Tinashe’salbum cover she’s wearing a jeweled head chain which connotes that she is wealthyand glamorous, which are the conventions we wanted to follow to make sure our product was realistic.

After looking at existing products made by other female R&B/Hip-Hop artists, we found that a lot of the images of artists on their digipak were close up. To begin with we wanted to challenge this convention by using a mid shot, however after our second draft feedback we found that a lot of our target audience wanted us to follow this convention, so we chose a strong close up image of our artist, taking example from artists such as Nicki Minaj and MIA. We found that our final product looked professional with the close up shot as it’s easy for the audience to recognize the artist and the album and portray out artist as a strong female. Another convention we followed for our digipak was putting a filter over the image. As you can see on the left both MIA and Nicki Minaj’s album had colour filters over the top, which are eye catching and stand out. We wanted to follow this convention as it made for a bright, unique digipak, so we put a pink filter over our image and then turned the brightness and contrast of the image up to make our artist’s face bolder and brighter, to make it eye catching for the audience, like what the other existing artists had already done. A last convention we wanted to follow for the front of our digipak was the use of bold text. This isn’t a typical convention of R&B/Hip-Hop artists as you can see, MIA’s album had no text on the front, however other artists such as Nicki Minaj and Rihanna had bold album names, so we decided to follow this convention as it added to the ideology that our artist was a strong, powerful female.

A convention however that we didn’t want to follow was how basic the back covers of female R&B/Hip-Hop digipaks tend to be. As you can see on the right, Nicki Minaj and Cassie’s back of their digipaks tend to be quite plain, with only a select number of colours which aren’t bright or eye catching. We challenged this by including a bright image which features a variety of colours to continue the bright colour scheme from the front of the album. As well as this, another convention of existing R&B/Hip-Hop products are that there tends to be small, unexciting track listings and information on the back of the digipak, which we wanted to challenge as our new and upcoming artist needs to be exciting with a lot of visuals to enable her to target her young female audience. With the text on the back of the digipak, we made sure the song names were bold and looked as if they were spray painted onto the wall that our artist was leaning on, which continues to grimey/graffiti feel of our digipak from the front of our digipak. In conclusion, I’m glad we challenged this convention as it shows the continuity from the front of our digipak of bright images and colours with bold, graffiti fonts, and also appeals to our young female audience.

Website

With our website there were no conventions that we didn’t want to follow, as we found in our research that female R&B/Hip-Hop artists’ websites tended to be very similar and although we wanted to make our product stand our from already existing products, we didn’t want to make it to different so that the target audience for our products were still attracted. One convention that we followed for our website was that of a banner at the top of our website which includes our artist’s logo and information on their album. As you can see, Nicki Minaj and Tinashe both have banners at the top of their websites however they’re quite small, so to enable our product to stand out we made sure to maximize the size of our banner to draw the audience’s attention and to confirm out artist’s bold presence. Another convention we decided to follow was that of tabs at the top of the website, as we had seen with other artists in our genre that they had also included these tabs to allow the audience to direct themselves around the website and find out news and information on their favourite websites. We wanted to follow this convention so that the audience of our artist would be familiar with our websites format but it was still different and stood out from already existing websites for female R&B/Hip-Hop artists. Another convention we wanted to follow when it came to our website was the use of large images across our website, like a gallery to show the audience of our artist what she’s been up to. As you can see on Tinashe’s website, it’s set in a style where images she posts from online come up on the homepage of her website, and we wanted to imitate this for our website as it’s an easy, interactive way for our artist’s audience to find out what she’s doing quickly. We made a gallery at the top of our website which is interactive, so the audience can click on each image and find out information from when it’s taken, but also they can scroll through the gallery without leaving the homepage, making it an easier and faster way for our artist’s audience to find out information on their favourite artist.

There were various other conventions that we wanted to follow when it came to constructing our artist’s website. As you can see, both Tinashe and Nicki Minaj’s websites have large banners promoting their new music, which informs their audiences on when and how they can purchase new music. We wanted to utilize this convention so in the heart of our artist’s homepage we included a link to buy our artist’s album on iTunes, including a bright image of our artist’s digipak. However, we didn’t want to make the promotion of our artist’s new music the main feature of our website like other artists have done as we know that the fans of our artist will want to find out more information about our artist before purchasing her music, and as she’s a new artist not everyone from her target audience is going to want to buy her music straight away.Other conventions that we followed from existing products in the industry are links to our artist’s social media accounts. After looking at Nicki Minaj’swebsite (bottom), we found that she had various links to social media, for example a live twitter feed which updates her fans on what she’s doing. This technological convergence allows the artist to interact with their fans, and builds the artist’s social media presence. We wanted to use this convention as our artist’s target audience are of the age where social media is used in everyday life, so we wanted to emphasis our artist’s online presence on her website so that new fans who find the website can interact with our artist on social media.Another important convention we wanted to follow for our website was that of live ticket information information. As you can see, on Nicki Minaj’swebsite she has a feed of her latest performances and where she’ll be performing in the future, informing her fans on where they can buy tickets. We wanted to use this convention for our artist’s website as in Hip-Hop music a large part of artistry is live performances, so we included a similar feed of performance dates for our artist with the option to buy tickets, which allows the audience of our artist to book tickets to see our artist live. This was an important convention to follow as it allows the target audience to see their favourite artist live.