Homepage Comparison

Websites and homepages are use to help promote an artist or band, by presenting both itself, its music and its image to both its consumers and its potential consumers. Having a website helps supplement both music and ticket sales in the digital age we are currently experiencing. 

An artist’s homepage needs to ensure that their name and genre is clear. This disambiguates the band’s image to the consumer, and ensures that the consumer has the correct image of the artist(s) in mind. Most website homepage include promotion of the artist’s latest album, a music video of a single from that album, tour details, and social media links. 

To illustrate homeapages, and their importance in disambiguating a band’s image amongst the oversaturated plethora of bands today, I have found two very different artists, in terms of both image and genre of music, and compared them. These are the rapper ‘Eminem’ and the ‘folk rock’ band ‘Mumford and Sons.’
zThe target audience for Mumford & Sons is largely young adults (male 69%, female 32%) at average age of 24. You can definitely infer this from their layout of their choice of colours, such as black and neon cyan, and their overall design layout; minimalist and cubist.

Mumford and Sons uses symbolic conventions to convey their genre. For example their choice of location in the below photo:



This helps convey the ‘country/folk’ aspect of their music, making appear that setting is like their music, rustic and literally ‘down to earth.’ The website homepage is very minimalistic, in that it doesn’t utilise any technical conventions, other than the lack of extra detail, which was most likely deliberate. I feel the overall message the site is trying to express is that the band itself isn't as egocentric as other bands in a similar genre. The fact that their website is minimal, and only features one picture of the band suggests that they believe that their music is more important, and that they may not rely on enticing new audiences with interesting website layouts. This message the band portrays, essentially is their star image, just an ‘everyday,’ down-to-earth-band, that wants only to produce music, and not generate profit. (The lead singer Marcus Mumford, however, has a net worth of $10 million USD, Forbes)

 Eminem target audience = young male teens in the age range of 15 to 25. Symbolic conventions are used to convey the sense of darkness and evil that is haphazardly connected with Eminem’s music. The colour schemes and choice of images, i feel help connote the conventions of his genre of music; rap. I feel the overall message is that his music is simple, but edgy, appealing perhaps to his early audience, who have now grown up. The colour scheme in the website lend support to the star image of Eminem, as it is simple, but still has a level of darkness and unpredictability to it. 

Both homepages are surprisingly similar. For example, the colour schemes are both very minimalist, and utilise similar colours, black backgrounds with brightly coloured text. 

What is different however is that there is more on Eminem’s homepage. There is more promotion, and significantly more text. This may be because the designer felt that the consumer needed to have more detail about the artist, or would find the latest news interesting, and may engage them, generating more sales. Example of this below:

I think that Mumford and Son’s homepage is more successful than Eminem’s. This is because, due to their lack of detail on the homepage itself, the consumer is forced to delve further into the site to find what he wants. This usually leads to the consumer spending longer on the site, getting more interested, and could potentially lead to an increase in album, merchandise and ticket sales.