The Visual Album as a New Promotional Form of the Music Industry: The Case of Let England Shake by PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy

Abstract

The new business model for the music industry begins to rely on digital content. Several authors have studied and say that the music industry is experiencing a shift towards audiovisual content. This is part of a new stage characterized by the visual aesthetics transmediality and media convergence on complex media formats. The visual album, as a concept consisting of video clips of all the songs on a disc, is positioned as a new form of musical promotion, hybrid between film and music video. The article analyzes the visual album Let England Shake (PJ Harvey & Seamus Murphy, 2011), with a few criterion that seek visual motifs that generate continuity, thematic unity and narratives in order to demonstrate its intense musical coherence with the previous album made. This is to define the visual album and start to delimit the other types of audiovisual products, as well as examine possibilities for creating meaning in the generation of a differentiated personal narrative for an artist / band.