Evaluation 3

Question:

How do your products engage with the audience and would your work be distributed as real media products?

1) The target audience for our music video, digipak, website are considered for those who are into the life of partying and living the "club life". What I see in patterns of how Trap Music is being targeted is that there are aimed for only those who like the music and are used to the music that they listen in clubs. When I was asking my class about their thoughts on trap music, a recurring trend of answers were that they would listen to this sort of genre only in clubs or when they attend school discos, however, they don't listen to these types of music on a daily basis. The age group for those who listen to trap music is 16-25 years of age, what’s different about them is they usually research music by themselves and discover music by themselves according to the team experience. These 16-25 year old audiences are people who go out to nightclubs and are very enthusiastic about trap music in the first place, usually getting into this genre by the use of the internet and having heard it from youtube videos since the start. This allows us to assume that our main viewers are one who spends time on the internet and nightlife, whether with drugs or alcohol, more than sitting at home in front of the television making them different to every other 16-25 year olds.

The internet was also a heavily based source for the audience of trap music because of its frequently used backing track to vine videos (R.I.P Vine) or from famous youtubers on the internet. After discovering this movement on their own, they went to sources to listen to more, the youtube channels such as "Trapnation" and "Monstercat" are channels that allows the audience to new and more trap that are currently being made or have been posted by different artists to the genre around the world.

Moreover, what the group also discovered was that the audience of trap music follow other certain trends within the internet other than internet memes and youtube videos, they also follow artist websites and inspired to be like them. The trap audience are those who stick to the movement and are fans of the urban and street life, they share a lifestyle similar to a hypebeast and if they do not have the money for it, they crave desperately to cop a merchandise just blend in with the party crowd. So in terms marketing and attracting trap music's target audience, there are shops that sell t-shirts that follow the pattern of an urban street culture to 1) lure the audience to buying their products due to its similarity to other street brands and 2) to show that there is a cheaper alternative to buying street and urban clothing but still look good. OWSLA.com's shop is a perfect example of attracting their target audience in terms of this.

Through considering our research for the target audience for the music video, we looked up on YouGov profiles in order to find out what the target audience is for trap music. What we did on YouGov was to find the target audience of the two main artists of trap music: Skrillex and Diplo. Here are the results:

The results that we got were really similar to what we had found out first hand. The age groups of both of the two artists link similarly to the age groups of 16-24 years of age, however, for Skrillex, it extends our predicted age group to 16-30. Both of the target audiences are liberal and more open towards discovering new things and also their sense in branding of clothing is similar to how thought of them being. The two brands of "New Look" and "F&F" have merchandise that are targeted fro teenagers with all the colourfuls t shirts and also t shirts with shapes and lines. However, these brands are not at the same level in terms of pricing as "hypebeast" streetwear such as "Anti Social Social Club", "Off-White" and "Fear of God" that are the main source of urban streetwear. 

In conclusion, the way trap artists use to capture their target audience is mainly the use of the internet and how different channels and portals help artists and certain tunes gain their fame. Moreover, the "Trap Nation" blends in with the trends of fashion other certain things that defines the "high life". Also, the trap genre promotes the life of partying, getting drunk and the use of drugs, so that the audience can agree on what they are portraying, which is the point of view of someone or something that is trippy and seeing animations. 

Codes and Conventions + Presenting 

There are patterns that appeal to viewers. In our case of trap, there are also many qualities, conventions and things that appeal to the trap viewers. Many of these patterns and conventions are shared between other music genres such as rap, EDM, dubstep and music genres which are close to each other. This gives us quite a lot of codes and it gives us a good outline, however many of these codes and conventions, we were able to research but not obtain due to the rules and regulations throughout the community, trap also being related to drugs and alcoholism limited our depth of learning about this genre’s codes and conventions because of age restriction and possible illegal actions, thus making our project very ambitious and quite hard to provide.

Although people tend to be attracted to the music not so much for the video, there are still people who still watches the videos and there are certain qualities the video should have that will especially appeal to the audiences. The part that appeals to the trap listeners and viewers is the urban theme. An example for this is probably the setting and the surroundings, text and special effects are integrated to this also. What I used was the urban brush text where the text looks like calligraphy brush marks and spray paint complementing with each other. This gives a urban idea because in an urban area, moreover, it shows an intertextuality to some of our inspired artists who follow this urban code and also its region, for us being Asia, we turned our heads and seriously looked through what an urban culture and the rise of culture in Asia really looks like and try to mimic its process and develop it to make our own label while maintaining the trap scene.



via GIPHY

Adding scribbling and a myriad of effects is both the fact that there is order but also chaos which will appeal to our target audiences as trap. Our other example is how we set the music video in a dark area with the floor being the road and how we make sure the actors are wearing urban clothing, since the idea of urban is linked to trap, I feel it would appeal to our target audience.

We linked many of our conventions to this, examples we were using for the codes and conventions were using the scribble technique to indicate to the viewer that our main protagonist is drunk and high making him “Trapped” which is the whole concept of this genre .This will allow the music video to appeal to our target audience.

The code and convention that will allow us to appeal to the focused viewers would be the convention above about being “trapped”. The use of being trapped will allow for relating with the actual audience, as the target audience would usually have experienced the same as in the music video before. Another point which would appeal to the audience is the music, which we couldn’t produce as we are using it as a base for our music video. People interested in this genre will have likely discovered this music by themselves or from their friends. And they mostly likely discovered this music by listening to it and following the youtube channels providing it, not much watching the actual music video. The proof for this is the lack of music videos there are in trap and the amount of videos which has a still or minimal effects and focuses on the music itself. Faded 2.0 itself was not an actual music video but rather a still with minimal special effects being the whole video. Here are some examples of these music videos. For this, we also made parts of our music video look like the youtube videos of trap nation, by putting the logos of our label and also the cartoon effects onto the music video as if the audience are being "trapped" by the logo of the MV.

To give our music video and label a sense of branding of the music genre, we kept everything to a similar colour scheme and layout. Firstly, colour, we maintain the fact that this music video presents an influence to drug use, alcohol addiction and also living thr "party" life. As a result the colours of the music video, website and digipak are similar to each other through the use of special effects used and through the influence of the artists of Vic Mensa's "No Chill", Getter's "Headsplitter" which uses similar animation techniques to represent the genre of being drunk and high. However, with the lack of experience used to produce a strogn similarity of animations, we were still able to maintain this message but at a lower extent. 

For our website, we tried to present and attract the audience of trap, similar to how OWSLA's website was presented. The audience of trap are loyal to their genre of music, moreover, the internet is the most useful source for the trap audience to gain news and to keep track on latest releases. So for our website, we kept the layout and colour similar to our music video in order to keep track of our latest release for the music video "Faded 2.0". Also, we had pages such as the shop page and the tour dates page in order to keep the audience on track to tour dates and also keeping up with the latest fashion trends on the shop page.

Digipak

With our digipak, we made it dark and we based it on other trap music covers and digipaks, since we didn’t have much resources since now trap and electronic music such as dubstep, EDM, Drum and Bass, are usually sold as digital copies with only front covers. Thus we based it on some other photos of different subgenres but similar main genres, such as dillon francis. Since trap is very urban, I placed emphasis on the urban setting in the digipak and also added urban aspects into our digipak. The prime example is the city in the digipak, however for the front cover we placed beautiful visuals of the actor being passed out showing he is Faded to illustrate the song and the genre if people knows about it which would be very likely if they are buying an album of it since they usually find out about songs and genre on the internet before buying one, especially since trap is now sold digitally instead. With the city area, it was supposed to be urban thus we added that into the digipak since trap listeners and viewers will be appealed to it.

In terms of the trap genre - new genre - there has not been a clear pattern as to what the digipak must look like, however, there are a few things that someone must follow to make a trap album. Firstly, a logo of the record label has to be either in the centre of the frame or on the corner of the album cover. Secondly, the album must have a party feel to it, with colourful party lights and a composition of DJ's should be present within the cover of the digipak.

2) What we did was a timeline of our distribution for the music video, and how throughout the 4 months, we created social media pages, tours and other sources of media to promote our song and music video that has recently been released.