Website Analysis: The Strokes, Lady Gaga, Destiny's Child

This post demonstrates the research I have done into similar artists and their websites, in order to identify conventions and similarities as well as how artists create their unique identity via a website and how they target their audience.

The Strokes

The Strokes are an all male band, and whilst we are female, they have artist identity I find very interesting because they manage to portray a cool image seemingly effortlessly and have a wide and loyal fan base. I have analysed the basic features of the website below that I find relevant think should feature on the Chaos Killed The Dinosaurs website.

I think the website is successful because it has incredibly good usability and fulfils gratifications of the typical audience member for their band: wanting to be more informed and seeking entertainment. The strokes have a much stronger focus on their music, performances and events than on artist image which other artists portray through options such as photos and behind the scenes clips. This portrays The Strokes as artists who are truthful to their personalities; connoting that this is the life they actually lead, they enjoy writing and playing their music. Our website will probably have more of a focus on artist identity, because we feel that there is more of a requirement of this by our primary audience.

Lady Gaga

Although Lady Gaga is a very unique solo artist, she has similarities to our lead singer, Arianna, who has a similar image of independence and being wild and uncontrollable.

Her website is more image focuses than that of The Strokes; the background is the promo-shot of her new album.  However, the website still has great usability; we will take influence from this. She also has a music video on the homepage, we will take influence from this because our music video is one of the most effective forms of marketing we will create on this project.

Destiny's Child

Destiny's Child are an all female group so it is appropriate for us to research their website. It takes more of a blog style, but still features the majority of the conventions annotated on the strokes website. Music is the primary focus, however artist image and identity is also key here, and their are three different images used: one main image, one from the album cover and one as a blog photo. This enables the band to create a more complex image and gives them greater flexibility of connotations because they have three individual spaces and so if they wish, three individual connotations. However, these images all work together in synergy and their are plenty of similarities, which is something we will have to consider if we go for lots of images on our website.

Research websites has taught me the conventional features of a website, the importance of good usability and it has made me aware that we must make a conscious choice on the balance between musical focus and an artist identity focus, which all three of these websites have clearly done. Overall this research has been very useful and will be a great help when to planning and designing the website for Chaos Killed The Dinosaurs.