Female Artist Representation

Within the music video industry female artists have a huge amount to live up to, the expectations built up by the media, their fans constant attention and no matter what they do there will always be the negative scrutiny from their critics.
As our main character in our video is female I thought I might look into the trends and conventions on how record companies present their female artist and see whether there is anything we could take and incorporate into our video.



As a starting point I looked at the industry as a whole to be able to get a general idea, and what i found was very interesting. It was the idea of 're-representation' and that to stay interesting and popular you have to keep re-inventing yourself.
Examples of this are artists such as Katy Perry and Rihanna who in each of their videos seem to take on a completely different persona.
For example within Katy Perry's videos she seems to have numerous characters, the erotic candy queen in 'California Girls', the classic teenage geek in 'Last Friday Night' and the stop bullying campaigner in 'Firework'. All of these 'people' are try different to one another. tho ensures she reaches out to as much of the market as possible and enabling her to branch out her audience.


Although this seemed to be the general trend in the mainstream music videos when I was looking more specifically at our genre, Indie-Pop, it seemed to be a very different story as each of the female artists had one very established and very recognisable character. This allows the fans to feel as if by watching the videos they are learning something new about the artists and thus feeling connected to them.
Despite them all following this convention each artist is very individual themselves. For example Lana Del Rey always seems to be victimised or a damsel in distress where as the lead vocalist form Florence and the Machine is very quirky.

Marina


Lana Del Rey