How effective is the combination of your main

product and ancillary tasks?Our main product in the form of our music video and ancillary tasks which include the CD digi-pack and

website all jointly adhere to the forms and conventions of real media products associated with the pop/dance music genre. For example, they're all bright and colourful. They all also reference the same semi codes which connote love and the loss of it. For example, my group included iconography in the

form of props like the heart shaped ornament in our video, gifs and pictures of hearts/broken hearts on our band's website and a broken heart which replaces part of the "i" on our album cover. These all relate

to and emphasise the existing relationship and then the break up featured in our main product (our music video). This links to the song "Desire" we used for our video and the official video for it by Years &

Years, since they too follow a narrative about love as the song title suggests.

Significant similarities:Our main product in the form of our music video and ancillary tasks which include the CD digi-pack and website all jointly adhere to the forms and conventions of real media products associated with the pop/dance music genre. For example, they're all bright and colourful. They all also reference the same semi codes which connote love and the loss of it. For example, my group included iconography in the form of props like the heart shaped ornament in our video, gifs (like of a figure of a girl throwing up hearts) and pictures of hearts/broken hearts on our band's website and a broken heart which replaces part of the "i" on our album cover which can be seen on the right. These all relate to and emphasise the existing relationship and then the break up featured in our main product (our music video). This links to the song "Desire" we used for our video and the official video for it by Years & Years, since they too follow a narrative about love as the song title suggests.

Like the trio and other real artists, we also created our product and ancillary tasks with the mind-set that promotion is really important. This is why we used the image of the female character in the music video on the front and back of our album, as well as on our website to make us recognisable. We also used the same colour scheme within the main product and ancillary tasks which included red because it has connotations of love and death to symbolise the relationship in our music video and the ending of it in a dramatic way. The same snake skin background of the album cover was used as the background of the website so that they connect to one another and the name of our band "Cupid and Medusa" too. I also used bold, deterministic typography for the website, for example, for the lexis “Get the new album & single now!” to emphatically promote us. This is a tactic I learnt from Years & Years official website.

Semic codes = promotion:This is why I edited tears onto the face of the female character of our video on the front cover and made her into a Medusa hybrid for the back cover of our album. The ending of their relationship is emphasised by the fact I edited it to look like a cracked screen (which can be seen at the top). I also edited a picture of her to make her look like Snow White for one of the CD inserts with the seven deadly sins written on it (which can be seen at the bottom). This represents how innocence can be lost and secrets can be poison. Even the names of our album tracks link to these themes.

This shows that the combination of all of them help to amplify the messages we’re representing which include life not being the perfect fairy-tale, but through confidence and self-worth, life can be meaningful and you don’t need other people to be happy.

This relates to Katz and Lazarsfeld’s Two Step Flow theory which states that our messages may be passed on to many different people via opinion leaders and interpreted in many different ways. Since our products can be interpreted differently, this shows the combined large scale impact of our main product and ancillary tasks could have.

We used similar attributes as a result of our planning stages as we thought about the concept of love. This resulted in us thinking about Adam and Eve, which led to thoughts about the Garden of Eden, the snake, Medusa, the apple in the garden and Snow White's poison apple.

These different concepts are all linked together within our main product and ancillary tasks as they all share similar semic codes and metaphorical meanings linked to “Desire” and how it may cause tragedy. For example, snakes can be a reference to the character of the boyfriend in our music video, which could result in the female character’s loss of love and her turning into Medusa (which is also a reference to snakes due to her hair).

Synergy and brand identity:We also featured the link to the website on the back of our album cover and inserted other social media links such as Facebook and Twitter onto the site (as can be seen at the top). The importance of links to social media was learnt from Years & Years official website as they include a lot of them. With all of these combined, it effectively results in the creation of our brand identity, "Cupid & Medusa" and helps our fictional group become recognisable. This is what real artists would need in order to gain fans and maintain a fandom. This is emphasised by pages we have included on our website such as a link to merchandise with our name and pictures representing love/losing love on them which would help to promote us if we were real artists (as can be seen at the bottom).

As a result we have created a main product and ancillary tasks which have a synergy between them. This is really important to both the music industry and audience due it us creating and maintaining a brand identity which makes us instantly recognisable for the pop/dance music genre we’re associated with and our original perspective on how love doesn’t always end in a happily ever after. This makes it easier for people who aren’t already part of our fandom to discover and be interested in us as they are familiar with the existing connotations of pop/dance music. However, in relation to Anderson’s Longtail Theory which states that our culture is moving from mainstream markets and products to a large number of niche ones, as a new group with original ideas it may mean we would find it easier to gain recognition if we were real artists now.

Main Product, Ancillary Tasks & how they relate:

Screenshots of the video on the top right, the front and back cover of the CD on the bottom right and and the homepage of the website on the left show that the combination of all of them all effectively represent the themes of love and the loss of it that we wanted to symbolise. They all help to promote our band and our single “Desire, since they echo it’s lyrics. Therefore, these help to make our band “Cupid & Medusa” easily recognisable.