Genre Study: Codes And Conventions Of Relevant Genre To Music Digipak

The song that we have decided to use for the production of our music video is a song called 'Ghost' by a young female artist called Carla Jaye who specialises in the Indie/R&B genre and also sings covers songs by artists such as Stevie Wonder who specialise in the Soul genre. As a part of our final project, we will be required to create a digipak for our chosen artist. In order to get an idea of what the digipak for a female R&B artist should look like, we have looked at a number of album covers of artists such as Keri Hilson, Jennifer Hudson, Adele, Rihanna,  Beyonce, etc. The vast majority of female artists digipaks and albums contain an image of the artist themselves on the front cover. The image on the front of the digipak is commonly selected to match the genre of the music on the album. 

The typical conventions of the front cover of a female R&B artists digipak includes:

• An image of the artist or of a relevant logo on the front cover (Usually a close up or a mid shot).
• The artist is usually making direct eye contact with the audience, enticing the audience to focus their attention on the artwork of the digipak.
• The artists name in a font which stands out to the target audience.
• The name of the album in the same, or a similar font which reflects the genre of music on the album.
• Parental advisory logo if the album contains songs with explicit lyrics.

Adele - 21

The image is usually one where you can clearly see the artists face so that we can see their facial expressions and so that we can easily identify the artist if their name is not on the front cover of the album. We can tell what genre of music we may find on the album through the artists facial expression, and how the artist is represented through their composition and through the appearance of the album cover e.g. if we look at Adeles album on the left, we can see that she has her head on her hand and she is looking down. The image is in black and white, which is quite despessing suggesting that Adele is quite an emotional person who finds herself caught in deep thoughts every now and then, and sings emotional slow songs to evoke some sort of emotion from the audience. Through this representation of her, we can assume that she sings blues/soul music, because this is a slow genre of music which usually generates a feeling from the audience.

Beyonce - 4

It is also possible to tell the genre of the music on the album through the way that the artist is dressed in the image on the front cover. If we look at the cover of Beyonce's most recent album 4, we can see that she is dressed quite provocatively, which is seen as quite typical of women in R&B music videos. Her lack of clothing means that some males may enjoy the sight on the album artwork, which in a sense represents the artist as vulnerable and submissive. This suggests that she may sing some emotional songs which are a combination of R&B and blues. She appears to be wearing only a scarf which is covering up her shoulders and her breasts, but leaves her cleavage exposed to the viewers. Because she is supporting the stereotypical view of women in music videos, particularly R&B music videos, we can therefore assume that the genre of music on the album would probably be R&B. 

Keri Hilson - In A Perfect World

The typography used on the front cover of the digipak or the album is also key in helping an audience to identify the genre of music that may be on the album. The typography used for the album cover of Keri Hilson's 'In A Perfect World' is bold and with a 'Vegas' type lighting font positioned at the top of the album cover. The bright and visually appealing font is often the style of font used for the titles on most Pop albums and so we can therefore assume that the genre of music which may appear on Keri Hilson's album would be Pop.