Digipak Analysis:

For my analysis of digipak, I have chosen to take a look at a digipak from the famous metal band: Iron Maiden. The picture can be found below:

This is a 6 faced digipak, containing A booklet of the creaters of the album, song list, lyric sheet and CD with a live DVD of the band preforming live in Sweeden. This digipak is aimed at the long-term fans of Iron Maiden and follows the original style that the previous albums had. The albums before, had the similar gritty art-style of the character "Eddie" (Iron maiden's 'mascot') drawn by such artists like Melvin Grant, Huge Syme, Mark Wilkinson, David Patchett and Tim Bradstreet. The farmiliar font of Iron maiden is also on the cover, again, to appease the long-term fans of the band.

Considering that this band falls under the cateagory "Metal", the colours have been chosen to have a dark gritty tone to them. Even the colours on the CD's keep up with the colours on the digipak itself. The reason for these gritty colours is, of course, it is a very gritty and dark style of music; and this album cover reinforces their genre as a metal band. If this digipak were to have, let's say, Colours of green blue and red on a black background, the audience would not think that this was an Iron maiden band, considering in every album they have a certain icon with gritty colours. They would instead think that this was a drum and Bass band, or a techno album.

Another way it reinforces it's genre is the imagry. We see on the left side of the digipak there is a scene from the stage that is blacked out with an acception of a giant modle of "Eddie" with a dark purple glow. To the center, we have gothic imagry of skulls and gouls, again with the purplish glow. The gothic feel to it is also a good design choice, since the majority of the audience will be gothic people.

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This next band is more relective on my chosen band's genre- inde/punk/rock/garage. Considering I could not find any digipaks for "The King Blues" I thought it would be wise to inspect their normal album art instead, to give me a rough idea on how the digipak will be designed.

The genre of punk/inde has been known to be more of a rebelious type of music. This is shown in the album art as soon as you look at it. The band has been placed infront of a bilboard with grafitii on it. Now, grafitii is already the sign of expression on the true world and going agaisnt the rules, but this is a different kind of grafitii. Since the band is more focused on the rebelling agasint the government, it is exicuted in the form of a letter to Gordan Brown. Agruing with the choices that he has made when he was in 'control'. Not only this, but the song this album is based on, has some of the words that have been written on the bill-board. The font of the words "The King Blues" also appear to look like an old army font, but slightly modified, maybe to symbolize that this group works for us like an army. More on that soon.

The colour choice for the album isn't bright, but it is also not very dark and gloomy with gothic imagry like the pervious digipak had, because of the band's genre. But it is also not brightly coloured because the colours must reflect of the subject of which the band is singing about. In this case, it is about a Broken England where the Middle to lower class of people live harder lives filled with tax and sons going out to war. Where as the higher class don't need to worry about such things. "The Rich get richer and the Poor get poorer." Because of this, the album cover is shot on location of a London street. The colours are dark and bland, reflecting on the situation the band's country is in. They are also wearing every-day clothes you see many people wear around busy streets such as York, so it also shows us that these people represent the every-man. But in this case, they are speaking up for those who are too afraid to. The album art is a voice of opinion.

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Finally, I will take a look at the album art of the Band that me and my group will be making a music video of. Jamie T (which again, I could not find any digipak images of):

This is the album "Kings and Queens" which contains the song which we are going to be making a video of "Sticks and Stones." Like The King Blues, Jamie T is also located in England, and the genre is the exact same, but both their subject matters are completely different, and this shows in the album. The King Blues deal more with rebelling agasint "the man" but Jamie T is more about having a good time and living life as it comes. The album has much more colour and is a lot brighter than The King Blue's album, maybe made to show the better part of living in a place like England. TKB targets the more run-down part of society, but Jamie T goes for a picture of the blue sky near nice clean buildings.

This is because good times are usually asociated with bright happy colours, and this is what Jamie T does with this album work. Because of the pace of the song and energy, you also have Jamie T jumping in the picture, just to show that this band is full of entertaining, none-stop energy. It also reflects on what other kind of songs that will be found in this album. No one would pick up a bright coloured CD with images off people jumping around and expect to hear them singing about things like how his dog ran away and he's all sad about it.

However, that would only be exceptable if he sang about how his dog ran away and then gave chase, trying to catch it in a numerous amount of ways.

The use of font is also very basic and doesn't seem to have any meaning behind it, unlike what the King Blues did, but it does however back-up the idea that this band is a lot more 'colourful' than TKB.