So our group, when thinking up a subject interesting enough to create an information resource on, decided to do something that would appeal to the interests of each member. Fusing Sean’s knowledge of music production and Sekou’s knowledge of the commercial art/design field, we decided it wouldn’t be an entire bore to create a resource on how to release a musical album. It was a big task despite sounding kinda easy and simple, but when you get deep into things, it turns out it can be quite complex and there are multiple facets and many things to consider when deciding to drop an album. Not really knowing how to bring this down to earth, much less create a information based website and present it to the class, we did some quick preliminary google searching to grasp some kind of understanding on what we were trying to do. So we decided to do was split the work amongst the three of us; Sean would focus on the music development side of things, Sekou focused on designing album covers and Daniel focused on the distribution and sales aspect.

So with the project split between the three of us, we simply hit up the internet and consulted different sources. Though luckily because we were mostly familiar with our specific subjects, the majority of the info we’ve provided here has come from our own experiences either mixing and mastering a record, or creating artwork for media, right down to how distribution plays out and who really collects every time you play your favorite song on Pandora. We decide the way we split the project up would be the way we do our presentation; seeing that we had 10 minutes to play with, we felt it would be fair that we split it 3min each and that each member would be responsible for their own slides. We then e-mailed our.ppt files between each other and fused our separate presentations into one. This was done out of necessity due to the fact that everyone was busy outside of class due to work, family, e.t.c and had conflicting schedules, so no meet up.

By the following Monday, we had our proposal written, and the open lab site was operational which we started re-designing to look . . . less crappy than the default template. We gave each member their own separate page on the site for their respective segment of the project.  Five pages total, there’s the Album cover design page,  the Distribution & Sales page ,the Music Development and the Proposal pages and we also created the main default site page titled “So you wanna release an album” which is just a short blurb about what a viewer can expect from our resource. The Web banner was designed with some quick Adobe illustrator and Photoshop work from Sekou. Daniel focused on writing the proposal, while Sean handled the website layout.

With the website pretty much spoken for, all we really had left to worry about was the presentation. We planned out the presentation order like this, Sean has the introductory part talking about the music production assuming you as the artist have already recorded and chose the tracks you want to appear on the album. Sekou talks about the next step taken in which decisions are made concerning the albums art, and Daniel concludes with the distribution end of things and talks about how it all comes together.

The major annoyance in all of this was trying to do so much work during finals week, with so little time involving people who were way too busy to actually get a solid chance to sit down and work. Plus the added confusion in the beginning concerning what to do the project on in the first place, all of which wasted a bunch of time that could have benefitted us better earlier on.  Were it up to us and had we more time to meet up and really plan a killer presentation, we would probably have written our whole thing in iambic pentameter, made it all rhyme, threw on a hip-hop beat in the background and rapped to the class about how to drop an album yo! Haha it coulda been awesome . . . or really cheesy and embarrassingly funny but way more epic than it was.