How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions? 

Most people in our star and genre wear simple clothes, talk about real problems and anxieties in their songs, and wear clothes that aren’t too flashy. All the artists in the genre are young. A lot of the genre is promoted on social media because it is common knowledge that the best way to reach and target your audience is to post on a social media page. During our research, we looked at a lot of designs that were based on the genre and its artists, and we made a “look book” on Padlet that we could use to help us design our own album cover in InDesign. emo-rap usually has a set of clothes and jewellery that people wear to make them look like they’re sympathetic but also successful to the people who see them. For example, in our song video, we decided to follow this tradition. In emotional rap performances, a lot of the video is usually used as a performance. We didn’t do this in this case because we didn’t want to use a lot of the video as a performance. It was important to us that the video blueprint shows a mix of perfection and imperfection, natural and supernatural, to show the audience that there is a mix between an artist and a normal person. We used both outdoor and studio work to do this. Usually, this performance takes place outside in a place that fits the vibe, lyrics, and general nature of the song. For this reason, we came up with a character who was both complex and relatable to the people who saw it.

How do your products represent social groups or issues?

There are numerous ways to display the celebrity and genre in the digipak. This shows the star’s thoughts on things and the emotional rap genre. We looked at other artists in our genre, like Juice Wrld and Lil Peep, to figure out what clothes, lighting, graphics, colour, and makeup should look like for our mise en place. Then, we used these traditions in our work too. People who study emotional rap album covers say that they usually have the same ideas. They use bright colours to show the artist in a picture or a graphic, wearing high-end clothes and looking like a god. Conventions include dark covers with the artist wearing common clothes like a sweatshirt and jeans. When we made our digipak, we used a normal artist in normal clothes, but we used a bright colour scheme of pinks and blues.

As many people as possible saw our brand as proof of Richard Dyer’s “star image” principles, which helped us grow our fan and customer base.

To show that we aren’t afraid to stand out from the crowd and Roland Barthes’ theory, we used a pink colour scheme. Using pink in our cover art is a way to turn that on its head. Pink has always been thought of as feminine. People think our artist is tolerant, easygoing, and metrosexual, which shows that he likes to defy social norms and the consequences that come with them.

We put a lot of different images on our digipak to show what the word “blind” means and what it means in this case. This meant that the artist had been blindfolded and wiped out of the world by drawing a bright blue line across his eyes. This connotation is important because it tells the person who is looking at it that it is about being blind.

We used tiny symbols to add philosophy to the cover. The symbolism makes subtle suggestions to the viewer about a wide range of topics, including the artist’s personal life, society’s problems, and political issues. As a result, many different thoughts and feelings are sparked by a single sight, causing a chain reaction. This helped us get our product in front of people who like emotional rap because it talks about a lot of different things that people can think about, even if they don’t listen to the music.

How do your products engage with the audience?

Social media is full of content that catches the eye of people who are interested in art, such as posts, comments, stories, hashtags, and more. People talk about the content in a variety of ways. For example, on the Instagram account of our artist, we posted an image of the artist in the studio. This image sparked a lot of discussion among fans on multiple levels; it shows a new project in the works, as well as the artist’s daily life and what their studio looks like, all of which are of interest to fans of the emo-rap genre.

Integrating the artist with social interactions may help them communicate better. By giving fans and celebrities access to information and having conversations with them, these exchanges help to build relationships between the two groups. Bulmer and Katz said that people should be more involved in choosing and consuming media. The researchers agreed with them. As a group, Bulmer and Katz think users should look for the media source that best fits their wants and needs. This theory says that people choose what to watch for five main reasons: education, amusement, personal identity, and social integration, all of which are important. Our target audience is young people from all backgrounds, sexual orientations, and genders.

A comment or a story also allows the audience to communicate their own thoughts, feelings, and emotions in a way that makes them laugh. The level of involvement, on the other hand, can be changed to make the audience more satisfied. Think that the celebrity responded to every comment or like. Each fan will have less pleasure and delight as a result of the change. This suggests that there is a sweet spot of involvement that allows followers to stay in touch with each other without taking away from the fun of the chats. Some well-known rappers, like XXXTENTACION, show how an artist can connect with people while promoting their music. A new style was created by mixing chaotic, terrifying grunge music with traditional poetic interventions during the advertising period. This is how it worked: Because he wants to please his fans, he has made new black-and-white clothes for his website that say “REVENGE,” which is the name of his new album. In the end, we ran out of these hoodies for our fans because they were exposed to new hip-hop, metal, and grunge music by X. Even though rap culture and fashion in the United States have changed a lot in the last few years, hoodies still play a big role. Using Blumler and Katz’s satisfaction theory is a great example. It shows how an artist’s new media release is based on how their life has changed since they made the song. X released the song in 2017, and it went viral, becoming a hit around the world.

We have used different branding or advertising on the social media pages of our artists. A merch release for our artist Linen Movement’s next album was made and put on the internet. This was to show people both how good the artist was at making music and how good the new album was.

How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?

An important thing about a brand is that its target audience must be able to recognise it right away in order for them to recognise the brand on their own. You could tell that if you put all of our work next to each other and looked at them side by side, you could tell that they were all in the same genre, had the same goal, and were all the same. Each part of my media studies project has worked with the other parts, which is called integrated advertising or product placement, to create a sense of branding that lasts through the whole process. The first thing we did was figure out what kind of rap we wanted to make. As a result, we did a lot of research into the typical demographics and psychographics of people who like this kind of music in order to figure out how to design the graphics, colour palettes, and text so that the audience would see it from the point of view we wanted. This helped build the foundations of branding in the production work because all of the text, MES, and images were the same across the whole piece. This allowed the audience to see our work and recognise that it is linked to our brand because of how it was designed and presented. This is what the mission statement said. It included everything that we had already planned, as well as how we were going to get the information we needed. This could be by writing blogs, interviewing people, and so on.