The Music Industry and technology

Once the music industry was controlled by what is known as the big four.

• Universal music group
• EMI group
• Sony BMG music entertainment
• Warner music group

These big four have had complte power over all the music we listen to until recently, though still account 70% of music sales.However with the introduction of new technology for example hardware like, recording, listening and even more recently downloading anyone can release music and listen to any music all over the world.

With the introduction of MP3's in 1999 and then the release of Napster, a music downloading site downloading music from the internet increased, espeacilly when broadband was introduced in 2001 and Apple launched the ipod and itunes and thus began the online age.

But how does this help our group?

We are an independent label with a low budget, with the introduction of music online we can easily and cheaply distribute music, as there no need for a middle-man distributer like HMV. 

For example with Myspace we can distribute our music to our audience, which is rather a common thing now days. 

Another website for our group to use would be Youtube, Justin Bieber who now has been signed of to a record company started on youtube to become known. His videos now rake in over 509million views for just one music video.

We have easy access to these sites and i would recommend for us to join one of them to reach our to our demographic audience, for example Myspace would be excellent as 44.4 % of the users on myspace are women under the age of 24 which is our demographic.

Filming and Editing

We started our filming and editing process.
As the exams have been on this month we've peculiarly started our video in probably the most not recommend way, however its been the most effective use of our time as we can not work together properly till our exams are over.
So far we've filmed the scenes in the protagonist and antagonist's bedroom, using some over the shoulder shots, close up, medium shots, tracking shots. As these past weeks have been difficult to organize times together we decided to start the editing process on the scenes we do have on Final Cut Express until we are able to have more free time to film the other scenes.
We have cut and edited the scenes we do have to the music video even applying some timing effects to make the audience aware that they are watching a text, a postmodern method.

Filming and Editing

We've now completed many of our scenes and have started editing them all. 
These have been taking from our first filming session, Amy and Emma filmed in their own rooms for a bedroom setting, one room was used for the Antagonist and the other for the Protagonist. 


They focused on the lines:


"I'm just another thing for you to roll your eyes at honey,
You might have him but haven't you heard
...
Do you still feel like you know what you're doing"


To show the the aggression and spitefulness of the antagonist we planned for Amy ( the antagonist) to do certain action to symbolize this.  We encoded various things in our text. for example Amy throwing her teddy bear, or grimacing at a phone call before then fake smiling as our preferred reading of this would be for the audience to recognize that she has quite an evil spiteful side to her, how ever we do understand what a theorist Roland Barthos said " The death of the author" which was referencing to the fact the author does not control the meaning of the text as its up to the audiences reading of it. We also used a typical music convention here by matching the lyrics to the visual, for example on the word "roll" is when the teddy bear will be rolling off the bed. Also Amy answers the phone to "Havn't you heard", Amy and Emma were very accurate with this because during the filming they changed the caller ID to the name Guy, which is the male characters name in the narrative. 

The antagonist was filmed walking down the stairs and walking out the front door. To do this we used an over the shoulder tracking shot that followed her down the stairs. Doing over the shoulder shots in this scene is good because its reflects the story of the video, it gives a sense of the antagonist being stalked and watched 
which she is because the protagonist is preparing for her revenge. We also used a tracking shot as this is common convention in music videos because its reflects the songs momentum.

 During the editing process we speeded this up, giving a really jolty messy effect which is a common use in our video as the narrative focuses on revenge and this gives an atmosphere of a psychotic nature. This is a theme we try to convey in the video because its easily connoted with anger witch is a mood we're trying to convey  . We did this to fit in time with the music and to speed up the narrative, todays audience are used to receiving information fast.

Organising our filming

Time in school is quite short and we're mostly all on different timetables so we've come to use Facebook as a place to organise important dates like our first filming sessions. We will probably be doing alot of discussion on this social networking site as we all check it daily and it doesn't cut in to our practical time together when we need to be as efficient as possible.

Storyboarding.Planning

We finished our storyboard after settling on Taylor Swift - better than revenge for our music video.
We brainstormed certain themes that we could represent in the video after analyzing the lyrics of the song we picked a few main ideas for sets.
We concluded
- The Protagonist (Female)  bedroom, who will be played by the artist but also a character in the story line.
- Scenes of the original couple in love, this will serve as a flashback in term
- A Performance
- A school setting to serve the benefits as a way of relating to my demographic, who will most likely still be students them-selfs being able to associate with the artist, and for the purpose of developing the plot in the narrative.
- An opposing girl's (The antagonist's) bedroom

These should create the basis of our of our narrative which the sets feel like they appeal to our demographic  as its aimed at teenagers bedrooms and school's will be familiar to them. But a band set also enables the audience to build recognition to the artist which is the start to employing loyalty which is needed for a successful artist.

This is a scanned copy of our initial ideas

Iconic Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift is a renowned Country Pop singer and her audience has her own iconic connotations to her.

This presented an opportunity to use intertextuality in our music video by using these iconic images to make direct allusions to Taylor Swift.

For example she is commonly associated with acoustic guitars which in itself is connoted to country music.

A more unique allusion we could make is to have our artist to have the number 13 on her hand. Taylor swift is known to have this painted on her hand as its her lucky number.