Genre and Artist Image - Issues Raised

A Background to the Music Industry and some basic theory. 

Genre and Artist Genre

Genre is the classification of a text according to its style and content, and possibly its form and manner of production. Each genre contains a myriad of sub-genres and there is a wide variety of hybrid and mash up genres. Despite this, each genre has its own unique musical characteristics and own clothing, hair and lifestyle. Each genre has their own music festivals, specialist music shops and radio stations. 

Image is a key element for music genre as their image determines their genre before they start playing so their clothing and appearance must represent their genre in music videos, album covers and in public and performance. It could also be that the artists look associates them with their role models of the same genre that their music is similar to. 

This is seen in many artists, for example the popular rock band Green Day and Breaking Benjamin very much took influence in their music from similar artists to them, such as Motley Crue.

Breaking Benjamin (above to the left) and Green Day (above to the right) took inspiration from older bands of the same genre of rock, for
example Motley Crue (to the left) and therefore have a similar style in clothing and hairstyles and how they appear in the public eye and on their album covers promoting the bands. All threeare seen to be wearing dark clothing with expressionless faces and have tattoos on show. This determines their genre of music and the type of songs/albums they make. This is a good example of how bands influence each other and the importance of genre when it comes to the artist image.  

This is something that should be taken into serious consideration when creating our artists and products and especially when deciding the style of song and genre we will be creating an artist and music video for. This is necessary because it's important to stick to the artist image of the whole genre and help the audience understand the genre of the song and artist we are producing. I think if we create a pop music video then the video will have to represent the image associated with pop, for example bright clothes and dancers whereas if we created a rock music video we would mainly focus on shadows and dark versus light and dark clothing and a hero/heroine overcoming a life obstacle. 

That being said the album cover must also contribute to this artists image. The album cover could either be associated with the music video itself or just the image of the band. For example if it was a country singer, the album cover would feature the artist themselves and maybe just a guitar with a field in the background, something that shows their music is very natural. If it was a rap album the album cover would feature the artist alone on a street or in a run down looking area, most likely looking at the floor. This represents that their music is about themselves and that they've had a hard life.