Album Cover Research

All the songs that I have in my iTunes library have a album cover, and all the album cover differ from genre to genre, artist to artist and also from the time they were released although throughout the years the same conventions have been used, but the technology used to achieve the album cover has adapted with the new technologies available. The album cover should attract you to purchase the CD when brought in the shops as the cover is the first things you see, and that’s what’s attracts you to put up the CD and turn it over to look at the track lists.

The typical conventions of the album cover are the artist name, the song title, an image and also a sticker such as parental advisory sticker if needed. However not all album covers follow the main conventions, however this could be proven effective when the album is released.

Personally I have always felt that a successful album cover should have a eye-catching image, however the examples from my music library show what I feel is successful and unsuccessful when an album cover is quite plain.

These are the album covers to “My Name – Mclean” and “I’m Yours – Jason Mraz”. Although the album to “I’m Yours” has a small graphic included, it’s still rather plain but I think it has been effective. Whereas I don’t feel that the album cover to “My Name” is successful at all, and I feel it would have been more successful if it used the typical convention of an image, and as the other the next album covers to the following songs he has released go with the same design but the song title changes, it isn’t that appealing. However having this same design of a black background, song title in red, and artist name in white, it would create an “image” and his audience would be able to identify his album covers by the repetition design across his singles.