Album Covers Research

What are the typical features that an album cover has?
After looking at a number of different album covers, I found that most of them follow certain conventions (listed below) but they twisted them in order to offer the audience something unique and to stand out on the shelves.

• Image(s)
• Album Name
• Artist/Band Name
• Track Listings
• Institutional Information - Barcode, Label Information and Logos

These are typical features of album covers but there have been cases that choose to exclude factors such as the artist name or album name on the front cover usually due to the band's image and target audience.

How would you categorise the covers in front of you?
The main ways you could categorise album covers is by:

• Genre
• Target Audience
• Artwork vs Advertisement
• Record Label?

What functions do album covers have?
The prime function of an album cover is to sell and promote the music and its artist, because this is what people pick up in the store and it creates the brand/image of the artist. As we have been discussing in class, this is crucial because the marketing campaign must work in synergy together with everything produced by the artist during that time.

However, I think there is a movement towards covers becoming more of an interesting art piece for someone to own because that is the only way that it really stands out from the other generic covers on sale as most markets, especially the pop genre is over-saturated. This could also be due to the revolution of digital downloads as people are becoming less likely to purchase a hard copy of an album.