My 6 panel digipak

This is what I have decided for the cover for my album to be. I decided to escape the idea of introducing the main artist on the cover of my album because I think it's boring and monotonous. I intended to keep the strong links with the hip hop culture therefore I took a shot of four spray cans in front of graffiti which was already made. I used dafont and looked through appropriate fonts which would look good on the cover which would also fit in with the genre and I decided to use a 'magik marker' font. I have created this in two colours and layered these on top of each other to achieve the desired effect.

Marketing an artist

When marketing an artist a really good idea is also to produce stickers. A record label in Poland, 'PROSTO' has done this to promote themselves as a label. They also do this for their artists. If I was to further market for chiddy bang I would definitely do this and add stickers for chiddy bang to CD'S for free..

Costume Research Continued...

I have looked at other pages belonging to other mainstream artists and they are all pretty similar when it comes to the stuff they are selling. Below are more examples...

This is a website you can order clothes from Chiddy Gang. The prices here differ to the prices of clothing on the Eminem website. This is because Chiddy Bang are a one season type of group who peak with one or two songs. The prices for their branded clothing therefore are different.

Here is a screen shot of Wiz Khalifa who is really famous. The thing that differs on this website is the price and the variety of products. There isn't a wide range of t-shirts which you can chose from and as you can see there is no evidence of clothing for women. The prices of these clothes vary from £14.99 and £23.99.

What many artists do is they usually give something to the audience if they order from their official website and they go over a certain amount of money. Below is a picture showing stickers which I got when I ordered from a website of a polish music label, PROSTO. I follow the label on Instagram and yesterday they have posted that if you make an order over, lets say £40 you will recieve a standard bunch of stickers which comes with every order, AND a free key chain. This is a good marketing strategy because it gives a little more to the targeted audience and they like to get free stuff from their favourite label, artist, singer etc.

Costumes Research

I have researched the way artists in the rap genre dress. They all wear baggy clothes, oversized t-shirts, trousers which are half way down their bottoms. The main thing is that they either wear branded, expensive clothes, or clothes of their own production, or of artists which they have collaborated with. In this away they work around their image and this is always happening in every music video.

I thought that I would have a look at a couple of rappers and their websites and what sort of clothing they wear. This is what I found…

The image above is a screen shot of Eminem's official website under the tab 'store'. Here he sells multiple accessories, CDs and his branded clothes. As we can see the prices range from $25 - $35. This isn't exactly cheap. He is obviously making money on this and most people would have to save up to buy a $35 t-shirt. 

As we will come to notice all these t-shirts are of the most basic design. They are not vests, they are not played around with except what is actually printed on the shirt. A lot of rappers are listen  to in a very large number mainly by men. Some artists, and this is becoming normal nowadays, have started to produce clothing for women as well. Here is an example from Eminem.

The first thing to notice is that there is a different variety of styles to chose from but there are only five different prints to choose from. This differs for men where there are more different and interesting prints available. $25 is the least amount of money a girl will pay for a shirt in this online store. The prices vary    from $25 to $40. This is much more expensive and $40 for a women's t-shirt is a lot. But there again this clothing makes EMINEM go VIRAL.

This is an interesting form of a marketing strategy. Even underground artists usually wear clothes from a brand which is known and this makes the audience buy similar clothing in order to show that they feel good wearing these clothes and in the same time they show what they are all about.

Marketing Strategies Presentation

Yesterday, Friday 15th November me and Matt presented to the class the marketing strategies for Master Zig TC. The character was made up by our teacher Miss Thrasher and we got into our groups and chose our desired character that we would market for.

We chose Master Zig TC because he was constructed to be an underground rapper. We did this because he was the closest we could get to when it came to the genre we decided to work in.

Marketing a mainstream star compared to an underground rapper is very different and on the poster below we wrote down our marketing points.

Marketing Strategies Master Zig TC 

We were quite lucky to see the differences in marketing in class. This is due to the fact that everybody else had a mainstream artist to market for and because we had an underground artist, it was a bit of a twist. 

Master Zig TC would definitely have a facebook account. This account wouldn't be accessable to any manager of Zig TC- it would only be accessable by himself. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and Instagram would definitely be used by him in order to spread the word around about himself and his rap. He would post pictures of himself on these pages and these would be more private, every day, day-to-day outtakes from his life. A mainstream star wouldn't be doing that because everything is monitored by their manager. On Youtube for example, he would be posting v-logs and videos from underground gigs and rap battles he was involved in or attended as well as his songs.

The way he would be recognised in the 'underground' is printed flyers and leaflets about upcoming events that he would be taking part in, whether it's supporting a mainstream artist or just doing rap battles in a club.

At the start I thought that there wouldn't be anybody that would market Master Zig TC but I realised that underground artists do this themselves.