5) Which ancillary tasks you plan to create?

We plan to create an album cover and website for the band.

Album Cover

The album cover as it sells the artist and their music.  It brands them and creates an identity for them.  Generally album covers need to be aesthetically pleasing so it catches the audience’s eye and stands out on the shelf ultimately selling the artist’s music.  It has to be obvious what the genre is from the cover in order to attract and appeal the right audience. 

In our case, we will use the typical conventions of an album cover as they are a debut band.  We will make it obvious to our core target audience, teenage girls, that they are a pop boy band using these conventions..

• Name of the artist

• Imagery/promotional shots of the band

• Album name

• Colour scheme/theme

• List of the songs

• Barcode

• Name of artist and album repeated on the spine

• The actual CD matches the theme of the album cover

Website

The website is used for the same purpose as the album cover --> to sell the artists music but it is used completely differently.  With a website, there is a lot more you can do to market and promote the artist to their target audience.  The functions our website will serve for our band is..

• Sells their image (mainstream pop boy band)

• Creates an identity and brands them

• Promotes to his target audience

• Allows you to listen to and gives you a taste of their music

• Sells and promotes his songs

• Sells and promotes upcoming live tours

• Links to download singles/albums from iTunes

We will use the website to promote the new single as we can make it start playing automatically so the audience are forced to listen to it.  Then we will add the music video to the website so you see it as you log on and underneath links to download their single and/or album from iTunes so the music is really easily accessible for the audience. We will have a huge picture of the band on the website as this will really appeal to their core audience of teenage girls as to them looks is very important.  On the website, we could have links to ‘Pictures’ ‘Videos’ and ‘Merchandise’ of the band promoting them further and making them audience feel really involved.

We will make it very clear on the website what the genre is and who we’re aiming to appeal to.  We will make it clear that they are a new mainstream pop boy band and that the core audience is teenage girls.  We can create this through colour schemes, fonts, band appearance and costume (clean, shaved, cut hair, nice clothes will attract the female audience), how professional it looks and we could make some of it quite informal eg. the band themselves posting comments on what they’re doing as this will really appeal to teenage girls as they’ll be able to relate to it and will make them want to spend their money on them.

We will have links to the band’s Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and Youtube where the audience can leave and receive comments for and about the band.  These social networking sites are also a really good way to appeal to our core audience as teenagers use them all the time and it will help generate word of mouth.