Digipak ResearchBy Kristian Coomber

What is a Digipak?

A Digipak is a form of CD, DVD or BD packaging that offers a lot more to the buyer than a more conventional product would.

A Digipak gives an artist the opportunity to show off their music in a more creative and visual way, and is another form of advertising. It is something that feels a lot more satisfactory to the consumer than a music video or magazine advert because it is personal.

Digipaks are becoming a lot more used in the music industry nowadays because of the growing market in online music sales. To try and entice customers to buy the product from the shop, Digipaks are used because they offer more for your money and they are also seen by many as collector’s items.

Digipaks are made out of cardboard and they open up like a book. This is what makes them so intriguing to people because of their feel of authenticity and because of how the book style helps to present the feeling and emotion of the music that the artist is trying to put across.

Types of Digipaks

You can either have 4, 6 or 8 panel digipaks.

The most well-known ones though are either 6 or 8 as they have a lot more inside them, which includes mainly pictures but also a lot of information that you wouldn’t get normally.

Also, the more panels you have the more exciting it is, because the packaging (as long as it is consistently interesting) acts as a product in itself because of how amazing they can be - and not just a piece of advertising.

Most Digipaks will have a constant theme throughout: Whether that would be with colour, pictures etc. This is because when it is opened up the purpose will be to try and make it look like all of the panels collaborate to make one art piece, and if they aren’t consistent then the same feeling of amazement is hard to convey for the audience.

Examples of Digipaks

El Camino

We’re Dreaming

Hurry Up

We’re Dreaming

Hurry Up

Analysis

This Digipak by M83 only features six panels compared to the eight panels on the El Camino Album, but it still packs a lot of information.

There are two CDs to this album which works very well symmetry wise.

The colour and pictures are constant throughout each panel, but without being too similar either.

This Digipak features a booklet in the middle too. The is very common within Digipaks as it allows artists to show how they created the music and most specifically why they created the music they did.

The Digipak also relates to the genre very well. The pictures are weird and quirky but they still entice the audience of the genre because they show so much meaning behind them.

El Camino

Analysis

El Camino is very similar to that of the M83 album but just with two more panels.

In this instance I don’t believe this Digipak works as well as the previous one did because although it offers more panels, it doesn’t use them to their full abilities.

Although there is much to question about the Digipak itself I think it still works for the band that the product belongs to and the message they try to convey to their audience.

The simplicity works well in this instance and the repetitive yet consistent theme still works well for the band and the audience in a very inside and implicit way.