'Website - is a collection of related web pages, including multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name, and published on at least one web server."
In other words, website is an official online page of an organisation, which introduce some kind of content to a customer, for example toys, clothes, services or it can also be a profile of the musician or the band, created for the marketing purposes. Website contains several web-pages, which provide different functions, for example, on one page you may see an advert for the new music album and when you click on it - you are transferred onto another page, where you can buy this album on the same website, but another web-page. This is done to make the process of buying the products as easy for the customer as possible by making a website multi-functional.
Homepage - is the first thing you see when you click on the link to the website. Arguably, it's the most important page on the website because it has to attract attention of the customer so that he doesn't leave the page before buying something. It's also very important as establishes the artist and his work through symbolic genre conventions (colors and the style of the website's homepage) - straight away giving a hint to an audience of what the artist is like and in what genre he produces his artworks.
Hollywood Undead - LA rap-rock band created in 2005.
This is a screenshot of their homepage, which contains the name of their band 'Hollywood Undead', name of their new album 'Day of the Dead' and a lot of pictures mostly in black and white colors, showing the artists and the kind of image they all share - wearing masks, hoodies and just looking creepy and dangerous. Pretty much, this is everything a homepage needs to have in order not to distract the audience from their main focus - the band and their products. Everything else also relevant to the group like their music videos, tour dates, their shop - can be included on the other pages of the website, which customers can find in the menu. For example, on the 'Hollywood Undead' website the menu is on the same line with their band name.
Instantly we get a feeling about what kind of music they produce - rock, so it's reasonable to say their homepage is doing it's best to follow the ideology of their target audience. For example, they use symbolic genre conventions by creating a website in black, white and red colors or use pictures of themselves with masks on their faces, which adheres to their 'star image, all of which helps to appeal to their target audience.
Tiago Iorc - a Brazilian singer, playing acoustic music in the pop genre.
This a screenshot from his webpage. In contrast to 'Hollywood Undead' his page is quite minimalist - we can only see his name, a menu and one black and white picture. However, this picture tells us a lot about him straight away - he plays an acoustic guitar and sings his own songs. Of course, it means that his audience are mostly fans of pop or guitar music and single-person bands. You can't really see much symbolic conventions used here, but definitely, colors, as a part of mise-en-scene tell us something about the artist. The 'Hollywood Undead' also used black and white colors, but their pictures are quite dark, where Tiago's photograph is light and he is the main focus of the picture, everything else is in smoke, which again connotes that he write songs, plays and sings himself therefore he is a single star. In other words, his main message is about individualism of his own character, which is a USP of his 'star image', compared to 'Hollywood Undead', who are more about getting hype based on their group image of young rebellious rock performers.
It's hard to say which one is more successful because you cannot compare a rock group to a single pop singer due to they have completely different messages to send across to the audience.
However, if I HAD TO choose one - I would give my preference to 'Hollywood Undead', just because I feel like they've put more into their website - the collage they've created from their pictures works quite well as a tool to present their ideology to the audience, in my opinion.
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