This blog contains my CR essay for this component 3 project
For component 3, we decided to choose the music promotion package. As a result we created a music video, a digipak of the artist’s album and an official social media page for the artist. My group and I used the song “pov” by Ariana Grande which is a part of the R&B genre that was released in the Position (Deluxe) album in March 2021. We created a teen R&B artist persona who is warm, friendly, independent and bold. Our target audience is aged 16 to 25, with a dominant reading that love can be expressed through vulnerability and connection which is shown from relationships. This essay reflects how my team used genre conventions, representations and technical elements to build a consistent brand identity, as well as how we engaged with our audience.
Branding is important because it allows the audience to easily recognise our artist and creates a long-lasting impression. According to Stuart Hall’s theory, information is not passively consumed. Now, producers encode the message that they want to create while the audience decodes the message. For our artist, we encoded her persona as creative, passionate, and emotionally expressive through both visuals and language. Our artist’s visuals follow her theme that focuses on vintage aesthetic, which is applied on all products by colour grading. On our social media page, we used a brown and beige colour palette that conforms with the aesthetic we wanted to create. The digipak also uses the same colours but with additional orange streaks that connotes warmth and comfort and also evoke nostalgia. We used a digicam to create a vintage, old camera effect. Across all of the products, we used both cursive and handwritten fonts. The cursive lettering shows femininity and emotional expressiveness while handwritten fonts show our artist’s creativity and passion for art, which reinforces our artist’s persona. We further emphasize this by adding hand-drawn animation to emphasize the mood and help the audience follow the narrative (Fig 1). The repetition of these visuals across all products creates a recognisable brand identity.
Fig 1 (1.1 Music video with hand writing, 1.2 Social media with hand writing, 1.3 Digipak with handwriting and colour palette)
Genre conventions play a significant role in creating meaning and engaging audiences. According to Steve Neal, genre conventions have changed due to producers both conforming to and subvert established conventions. We researched the typical conventions of the R&B genre. From our research, we subverted several of these in our music video. This decision was influenced by our research into the original artist of the song, who is not an R&B artist. The song itself is not purely R&B but rather a mix with pop. This influenced our decision to create a music video that conforms to conventions of both genres. From this, we conformed to traditional R&B conventions, which includes warm tones that create intimacy and nostalgia, close-up shots to emphasise the artist’s emotions, low-key lighting, and narratives centred around love and heartbreak. These conventions are seen in multiple music videos. (Kendrick Lamar - Luther [2025], Victoria Monét's - On My Mama [2023]). In our music video, we conformed to the use of close up shots, filmed through a digital camera. This enhances the nostalgic atmosphere of the narrative (Fig 2). We also followed the R&B convention of love narratives but we subverted the typical lighting by using brighter lighting (Fig 3) reflecting Pop genre convention. However, towards the end of the music video, we conformed to the dark lighting of R&B genre conventions, which we used to show the shift in the narrative’s emotional tone to focus on vulnerability (Fig 4). Our research into the original artist helped in the development of our music video introduction. R&B music video introductions are simple and focus on visuals to help set the mood, instead of brand identity. However, for Pop music videos, they introduce the artist’s, and record company’s/producer’s brand identity. As our music video aims to blend both Pop and R&B, we subverted the typical R&B convention by including an introduction of our artist’s brand (Fig 5.1). This was done to present our artist as professional and create a recognisable brand identity that audiences can identify in future products as her career grows.
Fig 2 - Bright lighting used in music video
Fig 3 - Bright lighting use to subvert R&B genre conventions
Fig 4 - Dark lighting to conformed R&B genre conventions
Fig 5 - Producer company (Fig 5.1 brand shown in music video, Fig 5.2 brand added in digipak)
As for digipak, our research into R&B album covers both older and contemporary album covers. (Bird’s Eye - Ravyn Lenae [2024], Secrets – Toni Braxton [1996]). Through this research, it influenced the choice of colour palette and visuals to understand how different eras communicate their emotion. From our research, we conform to the . In our digipak as well we added the same brand inside the album cover to be recognisable and show that they are from the same company (Fig 5.2).
As technology evolves, new media platforms allow artists to communicate with audiences in more interactive and engaging ways. According to Clay Shirky’s theory, new media enables audiences to engage with content and collaborate instead of passively consuming the content. Our target audience are people aged 16 to 25 who enjoy relationship-based narratives. As our music video is set in Bali, it specifically appeals to the Indonesian audience. Psychographically, our target audience are creative individuals and viewers who enjoy vintage styles, analog aesthetic and nostalgia. In order to represent and interact with our target audience, we showed our artist’s engagement through several social media platforms, such as Instagram, Youtube, and Linktree. In addition to social media, our artists also use digipak as another way to maintain audience interest. This links to the uses and gratification theory of social relationships, about how audiences engage with artists and other fans on the platform. In order to do this, we presented our artists in a natural and authentic way by showing behind-the-scenes videos and photographs taken during the shoot, which were posted on both Instagram and Youtube (Fig 7) By doing this, audiences are able to see the artist’s everyday behaviour, increasing relatability and creating a closer connection with her. On our social media platforms, we use hashtags that follow social media algorithms to help boost our artist and expand our artist’s fanbase. Henry Jenkin’s fandom theory explains how audiences form communities and interact with others who share similar interests, in this case, the artist. This is shown through the comment section, where audiences are able to reply and interact with one another, (Fig 8) as well as share their reactions.
Fig 7 - Behind the scenes (Fig 7.1 shows behind the scene promoted on Instagram, Fig 7.2 shows behind the scene uploaded on Youtube)
Fig 8 - Artist engaging with audience (Fig 8.1 shows artist commenting with audience, Fig 8.2 shows audiences interacting with each other, Fig 8.3 shows our artists engaging through the captions asking audiences, which encourage audience to reply)
Throughout this project, we focused on representing romantic relationships as emotionally vulnerable. Stuart Hall’s Representation theory explains how representation is used to create meaning through visuals and language. We show this in the music video, through a scene in which our artist watches herself sing through an old television screen (Fig 9). This represents her persona as emotionally vulnerable. The way she watches herself reflects her romantic relationship, while the nostalgic visuals of the old television screen reinforces the idea that she is revisiting past emotional experiences. Barthes Narrative Code theory, specifically cultural code, explains that media uses shared cultural knowledge to allow audiences to understand immediately what it is trying to represent. We use cultural codes to represent our audiences who are Indonesians, we use stereotypes of Indonesians such as Indomie and using motorcycles (Fig 10). This represents their everyday lives which can increase the sense of relatability of audience and artists, as well as it is used to increase authenticity and cultural recognition for Indonesian audiences. We represent audiences of our age group being teenagers and young adults through mise-en-scene of the messy bedroom scene. By showing unorganised space in the background as well as other personal items this allows the setting to reflect a teenager's life (Fig 10.2). This strengthens our dominant reading being teenage relationships are imperfect and emotions are complex.
Fig 9 - Our artist watching herself on an old television
Fig 10 - Indonesian representation (Fig 10.1 motorcycle to show stereotype of Indonesians, Fig 10.2 shows Indomie and teenager lifestyle)
To conclude, the products we created are focused strongly on nostalgia and passion. These are used to attract our young target audience, who may relate and have their own passion and encourage them to pursue their dreams. By following genre conventions and our target audience, we were able to deliver messages that we want the audience to decode effectively, as it is represented across all our products consistently. If I were able to change anything, I would try to improve communication during the production process because towards the end, it became difficult to clearly define our artist’s persona, as our intended persona was not fully represented in all our products. This affected how clearly our audience recognises our artist’s identity.
