Ancillary task 2/3

This album poster is of an indie band called Noah and the Whale, the purpose is to promote their new album ‘The First Days of Springs’. It follows most of the main conventions including factual information the poster needs to convey such as: the release date, which format you can buy the album on (in this case CD and digital) and it also has one image and that image is the same one they used for the album front cover. However, they have missed one key convention which is they haven’t included a single of the song on the poster. This suggests to me that the album doesn’t have a stand out song and the whole album is at the same level of quality. As a selling point leaving out information such as track listings means audiences around the world will not know what to expect from the album, therefore they’ll not want to spend money on a product they know nothing of.

To counteract the left out track-listings the poster does in fact offer incentives to purchase the album. One example would be the quotes at the top of the poster, placed at the top to dominant the readers eyes they use quotes from respected magazines and newspapers praising the album. The fact they used such respected magazines like Q shows the strength of the album to people who haven’t heard of the band. They show a lot of confidence within their own album to put reviews of the album at the top of the page. On the other hand the use of quotations such as ‘great album’ may be because they are not a mainstream band that are guaranteed success with sales of their records and this makes them use promotional conventions to yield in sales. Another point about the structure of the poster is that the albums name is positioned at the centre of the page unlike the bands faces or the bands name their album name seems to take centre stage, this shows the importance of album in comparison to the band themselves and readers will see it like that too.

The ideas I took away from this poster is that when it comes to making my own poster I will include the albums singles, it is an important factor and I will not use quotes although they are useful I believe an album should speak for itself. Readers should not need other peoples opinions to make their own up they should listen to the record with an open mind and then make their own mind up.