Friday 18 February 2011

Second draft for album cover

Research into target audience

The Riot tapes are what I would consider a alternative rock/ Indie band band, this generally mean that they will appeal to a larger audience than other types of music, such as heavy metal. This is because there are neither pop nor rock, they are somewhere in between which leaves me to believe that an alternative/Indie band could be well suited for both demographics, this is because since this genre of music is at neither extreme, therefore I think the target age for this sort of music and therefore the band we have used would be early teens to early adult, so about 13-25 yr old would be the target audience, but I think more people would like it as the music is accessible to basically anyone. However it is difficult to pinpoint an exact group as a target audience of alternative rock/Indie as it's difficult to give a specific gender or age range or class to the alternative rock/Indie genre, as it is rapidly becoming more mainstream, with many Alternative rock/Indie bands reaching the top 10 in the music charts.

I think we would draw in a similar sort of fan base to this band as the fan base of the British band The Mystery Jets.

Questionnaire for album cover of the riot tapes open eyed dreams, and conlusion about how to improve the album cover


I handed out about 15 questionnaires to various people from Reepham College.


In you opinion what genre of music would you think this is?




How could the album background be improved in your opinion?




Would changing the colour of the writing to that of the CD be a improvement, if so why?



Conclusion draw from Questionnaire results


For the first question most people believed that because of its dark boring background it would mostly be some sort of dark music, this was further enforced by the black writing, to change this to a alternative music it was encouraged that I maybe made a lighter or at least more interesting background, and change the colour of the font to give it a lighter alternative feeling.

For the second question it was almost unanimous, make the background more interesting by possibly adding texture, and changing the font, I shall take that into consideration.

For the third it was difficult, as almost everyone wanted a different colour, however I am going to go with red as it is the same as the colour of the CD colour, this will make the album cover match more.

Therefore in conclusion I am not going to make drastic changes to my first draft of the album cover, but I am intending to change the font colour and the background.

Monday 14 February 2011

Comparison of the album cover I made and a album cover of another Indie band similar to the one we selected

For this task I picked the band called the Mystery Jets this band are a British Indie band, I feel this is the same genre of music to the band we picked, the riot tapes.

This album cover is many ways is a vastly different to the first draft of my album cover. For one on this album cover there is a picture of all the band, although non of them are playing instruments which is something you may expect if a band is on the front cover, they are all their, which in some cases is odd as not many bands from the Indie genre have themselves on a album cover, this type of music is very well known for pieces of artwork or symbols on front cover of albums. This is what I can pick out as the major difference between my first album cover and the album cover of this band, my album cover is in contrast very simple.

Another major difference between this album cover and mine is that this cover is a picture, mine is not,mine is created via Photoshop, starting with a bog standard background and working from that. However with my album cover I did go with clear text stating what the album name was and the band, with the bands name higher than the album name, the same technique is used here. I used this as it is seen as to be the normal layout for a album, however for Indie music in the past there have been albums covers set out differently with the text the other way round or sometimes not text, just the bands logo to let fans and followers know that this album is of that certain band.