Digipak Market Research In HMV (JONNY)

After being given our brief to create an album cover for ‘The Village Musicians’, I sought to conduct some market research in one of the UK’s largest music retailers ‘HMV’.

The first thing that struck me when walking in to the store were the vast amount of different sections ranging from band t-shirts to tablet computers (their product range is extremely diverse!) Looking around the shop, to the left a large purple sign caught my eye ‘Chart’ with a music sign next to it. I decided that this would be a good place to start!

The chart music was aesthetically well displayed with lines of the albums all in unison. In my opinion, this allowed the artwork of the album to stand out far greater than if there had just been one album per artist. 
An album that stood out for me was the new One Direction album which had different visual versions of the album, with the image of a band member on each. 
This gives the consumer more choice (or dare I say, for real fans, the opportunity to buy all 4!) I found this interesting due to the fact that we are also promoting a boy band, although arguably with much greater musical talent than 1D. 




Moving on from the chart music, the main section of the store is devoted to what seems like every album ever created, literally thousands! I payed specific attention to the Rock and Pop section as I felt that was the genre our song best fit in to. As you can see from the pictures, its not easy for an album to stand out when there are this many. The Rock and Pop section seemed to go on for ages!





 The albums are firstly categorized by music genre e.g Rock and Pop. They are then sub categorized by alphabetical order of the album name.  There are also other sections such as 'greatest hits' which contain compilation albums with a selection of an artists/ bands greatest hits. This methodology makes it very easy for browsers to allocate the album they may be interested in purchasing. 

 Along with looking at album designs and artwork, I spent some time analyzing the market for music DVDs  This is a much smaller market with the picture to the right showing the whole of HMVs selection. I wanted to compare different styles of music DVD such as; performances, documentaries and compilations.  

 Once again coming back to One Direction. I have found 2 examples of performance DVDs. The model of these specific DVDs is to film the band during their live concerts, possibly add some extra footage such as back stage interviews and package it all in to a DVD. A perfect item for fans who were unable to get tickets for the concert- the next best thing!
Alternatively I found this hybrid music DVD which consisted of a collection of Elvis Presley's greatest performances. This product was aimed more as a collectors item with a high quality box to encase the DVD with a small book including information on Elvis also included! 

 This music DVD is a documentary looking at the history of Rap music and its development throughout the years. It is called 'something from nothing the art of rap'. The purpose of this DVD is to educate the viewer about the music genre, teaching them to have a greater appreciation of the song. The video is directed by ICE- T who is a well known musician in this field of music. 

 Along with the conventional forms of music DVD that I mentioned above, during my market research I came across a 'fly on the wall' style documentary which follows the band around as if you are living the life that they have. The example that I took a picture of was called 'being... N-DUBZ'. The idea of this genre of music DVD is to allow the viewer in to the day to day lives of the band, something that is not normally shown.

After conducting my market research I stopped off at the listening post to see what styles of music were being played. Similar to the shop the selection of songs available to have a brief listen to (30 seconds) were in its thousands. These were all in a database with a search toolbar at the top of the screen, you could search by song name, song artist or even by genre. While I was very impressed by the vast amount of songs available, it was disappointing to see that 'The Village Musicians' were not one of them! 

From my market research I have conducted that CDs are much more viable then music DVDs. I believe this is due to the increased usage a CD can have over a DVD. A CD can be listened to passively (whilst driving a car, doing homework etc) a DVD needs your full attention. It is clear to me that a lot of effort goes in to designing the artwork for an album cover as when albums are faced with such competition against hundreds of other albums as shown in my images above and that many different tactics are used to do this (bright colors  quirkiness of the cover, no images/ no words). These all give USPs to the album covers, and increase the chances of a browser picking the album up! Having spent time in HMV my opinion is that the CD sector of their market is focused at the older demographic who would still rather listen to a CD then download the song online. This opinion was backed up having during my time viewed the majority of CD browsers as 40+. This market research will help me develop my own ideas for an album cover representing 'The Village Musicians',