Metalcore Branding on Social Media

WHAT I USED: CLEAR SENSE OF BRANDING THROUGH USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA - BANNER ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT - MAKING LINK TO DIGIPAK 

Social Media accounts are nowadays the best way to keep in touch, and keep your target audience informed about what is currently happening e.g. new merchandise out, tour, where fans can by tickets, when there has been a release of a new single etc. 

It is a great way for bands to sell themselves to their fans and let them know what is happening in their lives right now. This let's their fans/audience get an insight to their life, which is very often what keeps them interested into a band. 

For my analysis of metalcore branding on social media, I decided to look at the three bands: Slipknot, Bullet for my Valentine and Asking Alexandria, since they are the same genre as Bring Me The Horizon. 

Slipknot: 

Like many other bands Slipknot use their Twitter account to let their fans know when and where their next show is. With a tweet like the one on the left, they let their fans know where they can by tickets, and tweet a picture of them on a poster with the date and the time of the venue. As mentioned above this is a perfect way to get in touch with most of their fans. With their over 1.70 million followers, that get a notification when someone they follow tweets something, they reach people over the whole globe only within a few seconds, rather than it being on posters on the streets, where people often just walk past it. 

By then tweeting a picture of themselves in front of the audience they played for in mexico, they include their fans in their tweet. The "gracias"(thank you) is a little touch, which then makes the fans seem special, because the band thank them in a special way and include the language from the audiences home country. 

On Facebook, Slipknot have more posts than on twitter. However, some of the posts are still the same such as the one where they tweet "Gracias @knotfestmexico". Whereas other posts such as this one on the left are different. This post that has been combined with a picture, let's their fans know that they have reached the KNOTFEST and that they are now in Mexico. This gets their fans excited, because they know that they are in the same area as their favourite band. 

With their 1.9 Million followers on Instagram, Slipknot are on top of Twitter and Facebook able to reach an even wider audience that might only have Instagram. 

Their banners and profil pictures are the same on each social account, which allows them to establish a sense of branding. 

TWITTER

Both of the banners on Facebook and Twitter as seen here on the left are the same. A paculiar thing to note about Slipknot is that they haven't used their digipak front cover as their banner or profile picture, allthough that is something that many bands do.

FACEBOOK

Bullet for my Valentine: 

With their 321K followers, Bullet For My Valentine aren't as popular as Slipknot or Asking Alexandria on Twitter. However, the band uses Twitter and the rest of social media in the same way as Slipknot, which is to promote themselves. In this particular tweet, they did for example advertise for a meet and greet that their fans could get with the band. Again, the tweet indicates the place, the time and the date of where it will be taking place and what exactly will be happening. If they wouldn't post this on social media, there most likely wouldn't be as many fans as there are with when they tweet it like this. 

They have a similar amount of followers on Instagram too. However on Facebook the band has over 8 million likes, which indicates that their audience simply uses Facebook more than Instagram or Twitter. 

This would also explain why they have a lot more posts on Facebook compared to Twitter and Instagram. On Facebook they do also share their personal experiences such as one of them having breakfast. Again this makes the fans feel as if they are part of their life and it interests them to know what they are doing. 

Also they then write "See you tonight Perth" as a reminder that they are playing a concert tonight and reminding the audience who still wants to go that they might still be able to attend. 

Same as with Slipknot, BFMV have the same banner over their social media accounts. Again, this is to establish a clear sense of branding throughout. What is also interesting too note is that their top banner consists of a red writing where it says "Don't Need You", which refers to their single that they released for their album "Venom". It was released in November and has since been their banner. This again establishes a clear sense of branding with a reference to their album. 

Asking Alexandria:

Asking Alexandria are also a quite famous band with their 1.02 M followers on Twitter. On their tweets such as the ones on the left, they have the title of their band name and then the titles of the songs from their album "10 years in black" below. 

In the first post, they again as the other two bands advertise by telling their fans when tickets go on sale. This is a quick and efficient way to advertise for tickets, which will reach all of their twitter fans withing seconds by getting a notification on their smartphone. This is also considered easier for fans, since they do not need to go online and find out when the ticket sales start. With the tweet they have also put a link to their website where you can purchase tickets and see what dates the different concerts are on and in which place. 

By then tweeting later "Tour kicks off tonight!" they are providing fans with the message that tonight their tour starts and they might still be able to get tickets if they haven't purchased them yet. Also, asking fans a simple question such as "Which show are you coming to" makes them feel as if they can interact with the band and talk to them directly to tell them where they are going and that they can't wait to attend the concert. 

Ofcourse they also use Facebook to reach fans, since they have over 5 million likes on their facebook page. This means that with the use of different social media they can reach their fans that maybe only have one of the social medias they post on. By adding something simple such as the calendar here on the right at the top of the facebook page, it is easy for the audience to track when the next concert is. The button "Interested" has then also been added so that fans can click on it and it comes up as a reminder the day that they then play the concert. 

Besides that they have the same posts on Facebook as they have on Twitter with even more such as News from Asking Alexandria featuring the leadsinger of the band. This allows the band to directly address their fans by talking to them online. 

Asking Alexandria do for example not have as many followers on Instagram as they do on Facebook and Twitter. This indicates that their audience is more on Facebook and Twitter rather than Instagram.

The banner on AA's Facebook and Twitter are very similar, yet not the same. Also the only way in which they are referring to their digipak would be through the font that says their band name Asking Alexandria. This is also the font that they have used for the front cover of their last  6 albums. And it is the first time that they have chosen a new font, which could indicate that they are trying to rebrand. However, if it would be the case that they are trying to be rebranding there should be clear elements of this on their social media, which there isn't.







NEW DIGIPAK                                                                                        OLD DIGIPAK 

BV: Treatment

Bronwen wrote a treatment for the idea for our music video, whereas Sophie applied the pictures and theories. The treatment is something that could be handed out to people when presenting a vodcast or spoken explanation of our idea.

GROUP:

We are creating a music video for the song ‘Follow You’ by Bring Me the Horizon. Our group consists of Bronwen, Kristian and Sophie. The brief of our project is to create a music video, a website and a digipak. 

SUMMARY:

To summarise our idea, we will combine both performance and concept and will also include some aspects of a fragmented narrative. We are going to have the band performing in an abandoned location and also outside. We will also have the lead singer in other locations such as a bathroom and bathtub. There will be a female protagonist who will actually be a ghost, and we will achieve this through different editing techniques such as layering. The lead singer will slowly grow more and more crazy, thinking about the girl. The female protagonist could actually be someone in his life who passed away or just be representative of a relationship ending. We will use colour powder and black balloons during certain scenes.

INSPIRATION: 

We took inspiration from a great variety of music videos by various artists and genres. As examples, we were inspired by the use of colour in Up in the air by 30 Seconds to Mars, where they use color powder and in Bagboy by Pixies, where there are colored cereals in the bathtub.

We were also inspired by Joe, a previous media studies student from our school, as we really liked his use of layering, where there is a clear link between visuals and lyrics as well. We want to use one of Andrew Goodwin's suggested features of a music video, which is too establish a clear link between visuals and lyrics. There is one scene, where our leadsinger sings "Cross my heart and hope to die", where we will get a Pig's heart (achieving verismilitude) and have him squeeze it to connote his pain. 

MISE-EN-SCENE + CASTING: 

As the mise-en-scene of our music video will be crucial in obtaining a professional and believable final product, as well as achieving verisimilitude, we put a lot of thought into it. 

For the mise-en-scene such as costume for our band members, we got inspired from rock bands such as ofcourse Bring Me the Horizon themselves, THE 1975, My Chemical Romance and Fall out Boy, whose logo you can see here on the right of the post. 


Ofcourse, we also needed students who could fit the role and who had some experience with playing an instrument. Therefore, we held casting sessions where we filmed students from our school and outside of school as well in order to get a variety and have students/people who fit together as a group and are keen on doing the project with us. We had advertised for this via social media such as Facebook and had found males who were very keen on taking part as a band member. We will discuss, who we are choosing as our band members in our Podcast 2. 

We will dress the members in black ripped skinny jeans and black jackets, ripped t-shirts and black boots such as Doc.Martens/sneakers such as all black Converse or Vans. The lead singer, and also perhaps the female protagonist will have skull face paint on their faces, inspired by the TV show, American Horror Story. Some members will be wearing eyeliner and we have also ordered some materials in which we can create temporary tattoos to put on the band members necks and arms. 

Bronwen will design and draw these tattoos as she is an art student who has designed tattoos before. In order for the tattoos to stick, we ordered "water based-ink-jet-water transfer paper" from Amazon, which can go into the copy machine and be printed out with nice tattoos that Bronwen will draw by hand. The tattoos, will be based on what the Bring Me The Horizon band members have and also other rock bands such as You Me At Six, but mainly Bring Me The Horizon. This means that they will contain tattoos such as a skeleton, cross etc, which we will be evidencing on our blogs soon. 

The female protagonist’s makeup and outfit was inspired by the female characters in the Fall out Boy song, My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark. She will be wearing black skinny jeans, a crop top with some cleavage and a leather jacket. Her make-up will consist of dark, smokey eye makeup, mascare and a dark red lipstick. 

AUDIENCE:

In our investigation of target audience, we found that the main audience of alternative rock like the song Follow You, is males aged 16-25. This means that the video also should appeal to a male audience (Laura Mulvey, male gaze theory), which is why she will be wearing those type of clothes. 

DIGIPACK + WEBSITE:

On Sunday, we have our first shoot, where we will also be doing a photo shooting with the band members, which will most likely be the cover of our digipack together with a logo of the band that we will create ourselves. We will do a post shortly, where we will be investigating for different fonts that fit into the genre and could potentially be used for our digipack. 

On Monday the 17th, we will be creating our website for our band and start setting up our social media accounts. 

MVid EG6: Lady Gaga - Bad Romance

Lady Gaga is known for her famous videos to be filled with symbolic signs and filled with hidden messages. Stuart Hall would say that the audience decodes the music video in different ways because it is so open to interpretation. However I would describe her latest video for her song Bad Romance as very dark by symbolically depiciting Gaga as a sex slave.



Bad Romance is the first single out of Gaga’s Fame Monster album. Looking back at her previous songs and music videos works, the main message is that she is willing to do anything, to obtain fame. 
I interpret the video as Gaga being a willing victim in the music industry’s shady inner-workings. She wants to live a Bad Romance with the abusive, cruel and satanic music industry. Even if she is aware of its flaws she still desires to be part of it more than anything else. 
She is a Fame Monster and "feeds" off of fame. This is the intertextuality that could be linked to the title of her album. 

She’s a sex slave and apparently, she likes it. She knows that the industry is ugly but she still wants in. There is a sense of sadism, as she seems to know that this love (of success in the music industry) will hurt her and treat her badly, but she doesn't mind it. 

Intertextuality:

The BH that Gaga is wearing in this shot is similar to the BH of Madonna designed by Jean Paul Gauthier. According to Stuart Hall the dominant audience may interpret this as an intertextuality to Madonna. However another audience born in another age may also interpret her look as being similiar to the one of Amy Winehouse. 

There is a skeleton that is decaying next to her, which could be an intertextuality for the "Queen Madonna" is out, long live the new queen Lady Gaga.

In the beginning of the music video, there is a coffin with monster written on it. This could refer to her album Fame Monster and how she is desiring fame and how fame might be the end of her career because she is "drowning" in fame.

Male Gaze:

Since Gaga is a post feminist she would be likely to disagree with Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory. In her opinion, her way of dressing and her performance in her video  is to empower her and gives herself a sense of freedom. Talking about her costume her clothes are very revealing which would according to Laura Mulvey be to attract a male audience. She is shown as a sex slave of the music industry and the men watching her in an intense way are connotation for the music industry.

Normativity:  

This video provides us with evidence of what has become normative to us in our everyday life. A normative are stereotypes that have been repeated over and over until we consider them to be normal, hence a normative. For example russians and vodka. 

Richard Dyer Star Theory

Richard Dyer, born 1945, is an English media theorist who is specialised in cinema (particularly Italian cinema), queer theory, and the relationship between entertainment and representations of race, sexuality, and gender.

His star theory focuses on the idea that icons and celebrities are manufactured by institutions for financial gain. He believes that stars/celebrities are constructed by the industry to represent "real people" experiencing "real emotions". According to Dyer, stars are manufactured by the music industry to serve the purpose of; making money from the audience by them buying the stars records and becoming fans. His theory is split into 2 main sections: 

1. Audiences and Institutions 
2. Hegemony

Audience and Institutions is discussing how stars are made for money purposes alone. The institution is modelling the artist around the target audience they choose the star to be around. Lady Gaga was, according to Dyer, modeled around fashion forward people so that the audience could relate to her as a person and also relate to her music. 

Hegemony is also known as "culture". The idea is that the audience relates to the star because they have a feature they share or a feature they admire with the star. Some fans attempt to replicate the star in their behaviour, what they wear and what they do. However, this could have a negative impact on the audience since some stars may be doing negative behaviour such as drug abuse or a massive consumption of alcohol. For example in the 70s there was an increas of illegal sales of cannabis due The Beatles being fine with using it and saying that it is okay to smoke cannabis. 

Audience interest in the stars values enhances their 'star quality', and it is through conveying beliefs, ideas and opinions outside music that performers help create their star character to their fans. Now more than ever before, social networks give pop stars the opportunity to establish their own values outside their music. Lady Gaga tweets frequently about issues, and expects her “Little Monsters”, the name Lady Gaga calls her fans, to engage with that discourse just as much as she expects them to listen to her music.

While working on her second album, Gaga developed the theme of monster, both in physical form, and to describe her inner fear (Monster of death, alcohol, drugs, etc.). During the summer of 2009, she first started to use the name during her live performances to refer her fans. The name fit them well because her fans crawl and scream during her show like monsters would do. The little monster's grew and does now count for all of Gaga's fans who have created Little Monster social media accounts and a little monster website. 

Stuart Hall Reception Theory

WHAT I CAN APPLY : Apply this theory to my music video on what our dominant audience will think and whether the message will come accross. 

StuartMcPhail Hall, was a Jamaican-born cultural theorist, political activist and sociologist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1951. 

He developed the reception theory, which focuses on audience and the way they actively engage with the interpretation of media texts. The idea of his theory is that individuals interpret textst in different ways and it demonstrates that despite the fact that one message is sent out, that some might understand the message differently. 

Stuart Hall claimed that media texts go through certain stages of decoding and encoding. The theory states that media texts are encoded by the producer and that they contain the ideas of the people who created the media text. Hence, the media texts might be understood differently by every audience. This is known as decoding. An example of this could be the music video of Miley Cyrus for her song We Can't Stop and her other music video for Wrecking Ball.





In these particular music videos, the intention of the producer and Cyrus was to make her audience forget about her typical Hannah Montana image, which she had gotten after playing the lead character for years. However, instead of seeing her as a new and interesting Miley Cyrus, the audience reaction was that she was considered "slutty" and "disgraceful". This again, might not be every audience views on the video. 

Stuart Hall included 3 different types of audiences decoding of a media text:

1. Dominant/Preferred - How the producer wants the audience to view the media text and that they get the preferred message that is conveyed.
2. Negotiated - A compromise between the dominant and oppositional readings, meaning that the audience understands the text but disagrees with areas in the text that they have their own views on.
3. Oppositional - This is where the audience rejects the encoded meaning and creates their own meaning for the text, they completely disagree with the message that is being submitted by the text. 

SR/KO/BV: Podcast 1

This is our first weekly podcast. During this year we will do a weekly podcast in which we will be discussing updates, new information and the upcoming events.




Script:

Hey guys this is our first weekly podcast in which we will be talking about what we did last week and what is on the schedule for the upcoming week.

My name is Kristian I have decided to join Bronwen and Sophie’s group as their idea was good and persuasive. I liked their idea and I think I can contribute well in terms of directing, editing and camera work on set.

Last week we held auditions for both the female protagonist and the 5 band members, which was recorded on our phones and you can now find it on our blogs.

For the upcoming week we will go location scouting on the 12^th of October and then we will do a practice shoot with the cast and crew on Sunday the 16^th of October, to see whether the location and cast work well together.