How does your product represent social groups or issues?
My product only depicts a lower/middle-class group. Elements to represent this social group mainly revolve around clothing and settings. For example, I didn’t include any luxury branded clothes - I stuck to plain/ oversized vintage clothes from brands such as Levi’s and Titus. The only thing that may indicate that the actors are from a higher-middle class is the Jordan shoes as they are the most expensive thing worn in the video. My actors are also of white/ Hispanic/ south-American descent and are 17 years old which are all characteristics of my target audience. They are seen doing typical 17-year-old things such as playing sports and playing video games so they are represented in a very stereotypical/ relatable way and not surrounded by luxurious objects. This typical representation of a teenager is also seen in videos such as J. Cole’s “She Knows” in which you see two kids spending the day together just like in my video. Below you can see them in an arcade playing video games and walking around together. No issues are therefore depicted in my music video as it just shows a very simple/ “perfect” storyline.
How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of branding?
From looking at other artists’ branding techniques, I learned that one of the key things that contribute to a polished and successful sense of branding is aesthetics. By maintaining a black and white theme for my blog and a green and yellow theme for my video, digipak and social media, I ensured to have a seamless, consistent sense of branding. However, the main element tying my pieces of production work together is my logo. A solid, eye-catching logo is the foundation of your company’s brand identity. I made sure that since the start of my project I would have a clean, minimalistic, recognisable logo that I could include in production pieces. For example, you can see my logo appear simultaneously on my video, digipak, Instagram, youtube etc. and is used as all of my profile pictures for social media. I made sure, overall, to stick to stereotypical styles of font, colours and composition of the hip-hop genre for my branding (such as graffiti-style lettering and bold, bright colours). This also aims to allow for the products to be easily recognised by fans of this genre as they have similar aesthetic qualities of other hip-hop albums they may like. If you compare my production pieces to a famous hip-hop musician, such as MF DOOM, you can see the same similarities in branding techniques. In the image below you can see how he used graffiti lettering as well and he used a cartoon-style drawing which is often seen such as with Eminem and Snoop Dogg.
How do your products engage with the audience?
When a product engages the audience it helps them to develop a much more personal relationship with it and create loyalty to the product. To make sure I carried this out successfully, I researched different ways to involve my audience in my process and final products. Things such as the Spotify playlists are very interactive and require little effort for people to engage in but can be really beneficial for publicity and maintaining relevance. This goes for all social media accounts as well such as my TikTok and Instagram. TikTok was very good for reaching out to a wide audience quickly as through their algorithm they show your videos to anyone who may be interested in similar things by putting them on their ‘For You’ page. With Instagram, making followers is much harder but once you have followers, doing things such as posting stories (which appear at the top of the front page) can make sure that people don’t forget they are following you as they are always up to date with new products and projects. Other than social media (which is the most obvious way to interact with an audience), I did things such as creating merchandise and releasing NFTs. Giving your audience the opportunity to actually own something increases loyalty hugely and makes ur fan-base much stronger. The NFTs, for example, came as a collection of objects from the video. My idea for this was that people could collect an NFT and feel almost as a part of the music video. For merchandising, I also created a ‘shop’ area on my blog so that the audience could browse for what they wanted. Finally, both my video and digipak engage the audience visually due to their stereotypical hip-hop elements/ recognisability.
How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
Through looking at many hip-hop music videos from the 90s and 2000s, I found that usually the music videos are expected to include things such as luxury lifestyles, voyeurism, urban settings and fast-paced editing. I followed some traditional conventions such as the fast-paced editing and urban settings (streets, metro station) but I also decided to take inspiration from other artist’s music videos for slight intertextuality and less obvious hip-hop conventions. For example, The Notorious B.I.G.’s Super Nintendo scene references both to a shot in his music video and the popularity of the console/ games at the time. Ways I challenged conventions, on the other hand, include using younger actors and portraying a more typical/ not luxurious lifestyle. This decision also mirrors how unrecognised this artist is as it is more niche and follows less conventional ideas (while maintaining the hip-hop genre style). For the social media pages I had to look at more recent artists such as Loyle Carner and Rejjie Snow. Social media pages are usually either very proffesional with good quality and planned out photos or oppositely personal and upclose. I chose to follow the personal style (by doing things such as posting behind the scenes clips) as I personally am more attracted to these types of accounts as they can show the artist’s true personality and help build a stronger connection between artist and audience.
