In line with the Cambridge brief for Component 3, students are required to create a music promotion package for an album, consisting of a music video (MV), an official social media page for the artist, and a digipak. My group and I developed a fictional Indonesian pop artist named "Cinta Kyle"—a bold, confident, and slightly flirty 19-21-year-old Southeast Asian female artist. Her persona plays with deception, initially appearing innocent and feminine, though the music video reveals a more cunning side. Moreover, the music video reads the only form of teenage love as a negative, one sided relationship and explores complex romantic dynamics, resonating with a specific audience of teenagers and young adults aged 16-25.
Throughout the extensive research that we did according to pop genre conventions we conforms the stereotypes of a Pop MV that represent social groups through casting people only south east Asian and we tried to create our MV as creative through creating a twist in the persona of Cinta which is feminine at first and how her persona switched to a bold character this is also align with binary opposites theory (Levi Strauss) as well as we tried to subvert the conventions of a usual pop genre as women in pop music video are often seems as passive so our approach is to make Cinta initiates and dominates interactions as she toys with her love interest, reversing the power dynamics as usually men are being referred to as the ‘player’ now we are making our female star to hold that power this relates to Feminine discources theory (Van Zoonen) as it challenges traditional norms and offers audiences an empowering and assertive female figure. Additionally, the minimalist and simple design of the back cover is also unique as most pop digipaks tend to feature bright bold visuals and images of the artists to capture attention in contrast, this digipak uses a deep maroon textured background with elegant serif typography. This gives the product a timeless, mature, and sophisticated tone, which subverts the youthful, bubbly aesthetic often linked to pop.
Branding is one of the most important factors when creating a product, as it creates a memorable impression to our audiences when we are consistent with our branding and create a connection between Star, product, and ideologies. We incorporated elements to create a sense of branding through associating our star Cinta with a red bold color and kisses symbol from lipstick as we consistently included these symbols in our CD digipak (Fig. 1), music video (Fig. 2), as well as social media (Fig. 3). We did this as ‘Cinta’ means love in Indonesian. Moreover, we associated Cinta with the color red and pink. Pink is her persona as an innocent and submissive girl (Fig. 4) pink PJ in her bedroom and red top (Fig. 5) is after her heart is broken due to the toxic relationship that she encountered this relates to Dominant reading (Stuart Hall) with love being unreliable showing transformations of one’s character. Moreover, in our music video the use of color is also essential as most of the side guys are wearing white t-shirts which connote that they are all the same and being played by Cinta while Cinta is only looking at one specific guy at the start of the MV that uses a dark green button up shirt.
Through our digipak we conform to the generic conventions such as using medium shots of the artist as our main cover. This connotes the Star is the main thing and how we really focus on the artist in our overall product. The direct mode of address of the artist looking directly to the camera also speakers directly to the audiences which creates connections. We incorporated a cursive font with dark red color which we use repetitively throughout all of our product to create brand identity and so that our audiences are familiar with. What subvert our digipak from any other digipak that we have researched would be the inside left of our digipak that is a shot of our Star’s reflection from a mirror which implies the mirror shot suggests a "hidden side" (Fig. 6) to Cinta Kyle, tying into her MV persona (outwardly innocent, secretly deceptive).
Additionally, our product engages with the audiences mainly through social media platforms such as Youtube, Instagram, as well as link trees. Through social media we balance out to portray the artist in a professional yet personal manner. Star’s Instagram post contains informal pictures such as BTS of shooting the MV, childhood nostalgia videos, travel photo dumps while also being professional by promoting her album, billboard picture, as well as magazine featured artist. Not only that, Cinta also uses the Instagram story features such as question box where audiences could fill by asking anything and she replied some of them through videos (Fig. 7) this supports social relationship theory (Blumler & Katz) as it creates a sense of personal connections between Cinta and her fans even though followers are not interacting with her in real life, these digital interactions allow them to feel involved in her life and career this correlates with End of Audience theory (Clay Shirky) that the traditional passive audience has changed to a much more interactive experience especially due to technological advancement and new media taking over it has significantly increases the convenience of interactive social media. (Fig. 8) also shows how the Star responds to some comments from audiences in Instagram.
Overall, the purpose of our product would be to create a brand identity across platforms and be able to create a consistent brand image that would be recognizable and align with our target demographics. I believe me and my teammate have done our best in collaborating and integrating our media skills for our component 3 project.
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