How do digipaks appeal to their audience?

What is the purpose of digipaks?

• A digipak is a type of packaging for CDs and DVDs, used to store a product. Many album covers feature unique album art to attract audiences into buying them.

• CDs used to be extremely popular because they were the easiest way to purchase and consume music. Digipaks are pleasurable to an audience because they often reflect the music produced by an artist and sometimes contain extra features such as bonus tracks, band trivia and more.

How do digipaks speak to an audience?

• Henry Jenkins referred to fans of certain media as “textual poachers”. This means that they take meanings from a media text which they find useful/relatable whilst ignoring the rest. They therefore construct their own cultures based on borrowed materials.

• This is relevant to digipaks because Jenkins’ theory implies that they can speak to an audience and influence their beliefs and culture, by allowing consumers to take their own meanings from the artwork/designs featured on a digipaks.

• Stuart Hall supported Jenkins’ ideas with his ‘encoding/decoding’ theory. He argued that messages are encoded by a producer and decoded by the audience/consumer. However, texts are polysemic which means they have multiple meanings and interpretations, and only the audience can decode media texts to discover these different meanings.

• Different people will decode messages as different things depending on their background and context.

• Digipaks can also speak to an audience through the fact that they are a physical piece of merchandise which can be interacted with. Many artists will be more creative with their designs, so as to appeal to their niche audience. Radiohead, for example, released a special edition of their album ‘Hail to The Thief’, which included a booklet of artwork, and was distributed in an environmentally friendly disposable wallet.

The XX - xx

• The XX’s debut album features a very minimalist style: a black background with a single white ‘X’ in the middle. This accurately represents the band’s subtle, thinly textured music as well as its general melancholy sound. The artwork was designed and produced by the band themselves.

• This digipak greatly appeals to The XX’s audience because they enjoy the band’s unique style. The bleakness of the album cover (with black representing darkness and depression) and the prominent ‘X’, representing the band themselves, allows the audience to identify the album without even requiring the cover to have the band’s name written on it.

• From a Louis Althusser point of view, this album cover could be considered something which ‘calls’ to its audience. This is a moment of interpellation, where the audience becomes the subject of the album cover’s ideology. The XX’s minimalist, downbeat style is reflected in the digipak which beckons to the audience, who will likely enjoy melancholy music and art.

• The album cover for Radiohead’s second album ‘The Bends’ features the band’s and the album’s name typed on top of a low quality picture of a mannequin (taken with a cassette camera, according to the artist Stanley Donwood).

• The artwork reflects the band’s indie-rock sound, with the featured mannequin looking almost as if it is shouting, or in a state of bliss. Hall’s work about ‘encoding/decoding’ can be applied here: the producers create this artwork, and the consumers will look at it and decode it, taking their own meanings based on their own beliefs and background. An optimistic person, for example, may say the mannequin is laughing, whilst a pessimistic person may say it looks like it’s dead.

• The fact that the picture is so low quality is a portrayal of 90’s alternative music, trying to stray away from the refined, mainstream music of the time. This hugely appeals to the target audience; it says to people that it is different from processed pop music from just the artwork alone.