COMP 3: Branding Research

 A Level Media Studies

Here is the research I did on a few artists' branding on one of their albums, which I will be further analysing on their digipack. My research on music videos can be viewed here. This blog is written by me (Sharon).

One Direction's "Midnight Memories" Album

One Direction is an English-Irish pop boy band formed on the show X Factor in London back in 2010. However, ever since their announcement of a "break", they never came back until now. Yet, their hit albums are Midnight Memories, Four, Made in the A.M., Up All Night, and some discographies. Midnight Memories, the album shown above, is a 2013 release of their third studio album that describes the life of partying at the age of entering the 20s, and making midnight memories, hence the name. As seen, the digipack simply has a front and back cover with the album's tracklist (as per normal album/digipack), a CD, and a simple statement that says, "Listen to this" with an arrow pointing to the CD. I admire the simple design on the CD that still strongly resonates with the theme of 'midnight' with the additions of little stars all around. As much as I like the simplicity, I believe that for our music promotion package, we would prefer to add lyrics paper/booklet, and possibly collectables that align with the theme of the album to help in appealing to the fans/target audience better. Another way One Direction branded this album was through social media, such as Instagram. As seen above, they published a post a month or two before the actual release, informing fans that the album would be globally released on the 25th of November 2013. This, however, was only done through one Instagram post and no posts were made on the day of release. One Direction has a Twitter account too supposedly, nonetheless, I wasn't able to find any posts regarding the release of 'Midnight Memories'. Despite all that, this album still managed to become successful, thanks to their huge fanbase.

Taylor Swift's "1989" Album

Taylor Swift, the infamous American singer-songwriter for her hits albums such as 1989, Lover, Red, her debut album - Taylor Swift, Reputation, and so much more. She mainly converses on the ideology of love, heartbreak, and past lovers. The 1989 album, as shown above, contributes to her emotions and reflections resulting from past romantic relationships. Yet, I suppose, the addition of having birds on the CD and front cover enhances the concept of finally 'letting go'. As seen above, the back cover has the tracklist for this album, as per a normal digipack. Inside the album, there seem to be eye-catching lyrics of each song that still resonate with the overall theme, such as pastel colours. The additions of collectable polaroids, too, align with the major theme of polaroids, which is also used as the front cover of the album/digipack. Those collectable polaroids will allow fans to actively purchase the digipack as a whole to collect the polaroids they haven't gotten yet. However, as this album was released back in October 2014, Taylor Swift wasn't on Instagram yet, or Twitter. So, no posts were made regarding 1989's release. Additionally, I admire the idea of having collectables from the album which is one of the biggest factors when wanting to appeal to our fans - more for them to unfold from the artist.

Self Reflection: One problem and challenge I encountered while doing this branding research was unable to find the complete contents of the album/digipack as those 2 were really old releases (such a rare occasion to still be selling them). However, I managed to find all that by adding specific keywords to my searches and through online shopping apps that might still sell them. Another challenge would be going through their social media posts which took a whole lot of scrolling to the time of their album's release. As I did on their Twitter accounts, all that scrolling was for nothing as I did not find any posts regarding the release. Doing this research would greatly help my group in broadening our ideas when developing the digipack for our music promotion package (moreover, as each of my team members is researching different artists' albums/digipacks) such as whether we want it to be really simple, simple, or complete (includes other benefits, such as picture prints). Starting this task, I was quite confused about what to add and write on, even so, as I saw examples from my teammates, I quickly caught up on the task. The next time I was told to do branding research, I would be able to understand better what to include.