History of.. Album covers

An album cover is the front of the packaging of a commercially-released audio recording product or album. The cover serves three main purposes:

1. To advertise the contents of the music product.
2. To convey the artistic aspirations of the original artists.
3. In reproductions of the artwork, to serve as a primary image in the promotional efforts surrounding the product, an identifiable image associated with it.

The cover became an important part of the culture of music at the time. As a marketing tool and an expression of artistic intent, gatefold covers,and inserts often with lyric sheets, made the album cover a desirable artifact in it's own right.

The album cover for Jay Z's: Blueprint 3

The instruments used in the cover were to portray foundation (that's what blueprint stands for) and the colour white was used to to represent purity. The artist used '3 stripes' in continuity on the album and his first song 'Run this town'. This is what we have to think about aswell; we need to have some sort of continuity between our album cover and our music video. We have also watched the makin of this album cover in lesson and i found it very interesting that for just one picture, alot of hard work was put into it which goes to show that profressionals really mean business and no nonsense and we should be working by this motto too.

Using conventions of a genre on the album cover makes the audience become aware of what genre the music is. For example, Pop artists such as 'Spice Girls' and 'S Club 7' would have very colourful album covers.

Pop songs are initially 'full of joy' and 'jumpy' and so the use of bright colours (as seen on the covers above ^^^) gives a sense of happiness and being optimistic which automatically helps the audience identify that the genre is Pop.

Rock artists and Indie bands have a theme on their album covers and it represents images more about their music often using pictures of their own instruments such as this one:

Jimi Hendrix was a Rock artist who was famous for being the most favourable guitar player and has also been the top guitarist on it's list of 100 greatest guitarists of all time. Let just say, if someone didn't know who he was then by looking at most of album covers, they would automatically assume that he plays the guitar because most of the album cover artworks consist of him holding a guitar.

However, moving onto Hip-Hop artists, their album covers are more about themselves and 'showing off' their 'bling' etc etc and a convention of their album covers are always portrait. Here are 2 examples:

Another thing, as you can in the 50 Cent picture, he is bare chested, showing off his tattooed muscles trying to prove that he is strong and wearing gucci and 'bling' showing that he is rich. This not only attracts female fans but homosexual fans aswell. 'Pink Pound' is the term referred to when these homosexual audiences make these artists money.

The key concept 'Male Gaze' (feminist Laura Mulvey), is basically when women try to see themselves through a man's eyes. Shakira's album cover for her lastest album 'She Wolf' would be a good example:

The reason why this is a good example is because, as you can see, she is trapped in a cage which means that maybe she is being controlled by a man and the female audiences can try and see her through a mans point of view; maybe they could understand why she looks like someone trapped in a cage ready to do whatever the man tells her to do.

With digital music downloading becoming increasingly popular, the purpose and the dominance of the album cover is developing. It should be noted that physical music products, with a physical 'album cover', continue to outsell digital downloads by a substantial margin.