Examining A Hip Hop Album Digipak

I decided to analyse a digipak, showing how professionals carry out the conventions in comparison to our own.

General Information:

Album Cover Research - Melanie Fiona And Others - Sath

To begin creating the digipack for our music video for the song 4AM, we needed to look further into digipacks. The best place to start was by looking into album covers for the artist Melanie Fiona as she is the artist of the song 4AM.

Melanie Fiona's fist album was called 'The bridge', it was released in 2009. The album cover for the album consists of a close up of the artist's face, the picture seems to be a side portrait shot with Melanie facing the camera but looking past it to the right. It gives us a sense that she is looking back at something which could be her past. The photograph is presented in a grey scale format and shows a lot of the shadows in the picture. There is very little highlights shown but gives there is enough which helps define the face of the artist as well as parts of her hair. There is also a white spotlight on the wall behind the artist which goes with the colour scheme of the album cover which is black, white and grey.

Melanie Fiona's next album was called 'The MF life' and it was released in 2012 which is a three year gap between her two albums. At first sight when you compare the two album covers, you can notice that her second album cover has a lot more colour than her first album cover. In this album cover, the picture is a long shot which shows a side view of her leaning down against a lamp post. The picture is taken on a sunny day and has a lot of bright colours as well as a purple heart in front of the lamp post. Since this is titled the MF life, i think that the warm bright colours and the atmosphere of the picture is shown to put across the nature of Melanie's life and her personality.

The next album cover i am going to be analysing, is the album cover for '4' by Beyonce Knowles'. I chose to analyse an album cover of Beyonce, as she is another R&B singer and that is the genre of music that 4AM is from. For this album cover, the colour scheme consists of black, yellow, and pale green. The black and yellow is shown using Beyonce in a medium shot showing her with both of her arms over her head. The idea of Beyonce having her arms over her head, it looks as if she is relaxing without any care for what she is doing. She is shown to be topless with a long black furry coat hanging over her shoulders to cover most of her torso but leaves her belly showing. There is a lot of golden jewelery used in this album cover, it is used to show the wealth and status of Beyonce as she is a well paid artist.

The next album cover i will be looking at is for the album 'Talk that Talk' by R&B singer Rihanna. This album was released in 2011 and was the singer's sixth studio album. This album cover consists of a close up of the artist's face. She is shown wearing an sleeveless top with a lot of eye make up and lip stick. She is also shown sticking out her tongue which shows us the nature of Rihanna and her personality in the album. There is a big 'R' on the top left hand corner of the album cover in grey which is used to represent Rihanna. The album name is written on the wrist of artist almost making it look like a tattoo which helps it blend into the photo and makes it look natural. 

Ancillary Tasks - Digipak

This was our first option for our album cover

And this was our second attempt and and our eventual final piece

This is our digipak

Album Digipak Research

An album digipak is a form of packaging often used for album cover and in recent years its contents. It has been patented by the company AGI - Shorewood, a holdings company.

All about Digipaks
An album digipak would consist of the features such as:

Have a type of thick paperboard or card which would have been folded into a book style

Card outer binding, to bring the lyric sideline book together.

Two or more side trays which are capable of holding the CD to the case

Has a protective UV coating on the paper to ensure longevity and durability

The teeth of the packaging are brittle to allow the digipak to remain light.

In the diagram above, it shows the different sides of an album digipak and how it would fit around a CD.
The two end sides show where the CD would be placed and the little details such as the teeth and ridges that would be holding it in place.
These places would be see through as it would allow the accompanying leaflet to slot inside.
The accompanying leaflet would often consist of:
Notes of how the album first came together
A note from the artist themselves, often addressing their fans
The album track list
Lyrics to the singles that will be released
Contact details such as phone number, management, record company etc.
Sometimes it might be a photoshoot of the artist in the background of these spreads.

Some have even tried to make them recyclable by having them made out of renewable materials such as sugar cane and made ridges with the back packaging to get rid of the use of teeth.

Here some examples of digipaks that have become iconic to both the masses and in R&B.