Day #48 - Album Artwork: A Dying Medium?

Another article for the Gown, this time one for Features about album artwork. Hopefully you'll enjoy this one too!

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Album covers have always been something that perhaps the music industry has taken for granted. Of the Official Top Ten UK Albums (ending 18^th February), nine simply have a picture of the artist as the cover. Rarely does an album make use of clever photography or memorable artwork to help sell the music anymore. And perhaps it’s down to how albums are sold now.

In the past, an album would rely on its artwork more heavily to catch attention. The only way an album sold was by either having heard of an artist and actively deciding to find the album yourself, or by browsing in a music store and judging by the covers which musicians you would like to hear. So, album covers were made to reflect the tone of the music inside. Black Sabbath’s earthly-ghost cover debut suggested the dark attitude that came with metal at the time, Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ had an uncensored picture of a submerged baby reaching for a dollar to reflect their tone of rejecting societal clichés, etc.

Sure, there were plenty of albums that have sold with just the face of a celebrity in the past, there’s no denying that. But rarely has there been so little imagination in the music industry that the only thoughtful way to summarise a musician’s work in nine of the ten chart places available, is by placing their face on it. The reason for this is the rise of artist identification. In order for a pop musician to stand apart today, they need a public identity to be explored and exposed. So, record companies simply apply the artist’s face to the album to simplify the process. If a child is at the supermarket (or, more likely, iTunes) and they see the artist’s face, they’re already well aware of the artist’s profile and so can readily decide to purchase the album on that image alone. This cuts the difficulties in trying to advertise the album through other means and spending otherwise unnecessary amounts of money introducing an otherwise ‘difficult’ art piece to the public.

Doesn’t this show a frightening lack of thought in pop music? That people work tirelessly creating an album, just to slap a picture of their face on it and call it a day? Not to think it through and try to make something as memorable as Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ or The Beatle’s ‘White Album’, concepts which give the album an existence beyond the next two months of sales reports? A pop album will benefit from artist identification in the near future, but after several years pass by, people are far less likely to be interested in a cover face that doesn’t identify anything about the sound of the album. Even marketing suffers here, in choosing a quick ‘cash injection’ rather than staying power and lifetime sales, and the artists suffer from lack of interest. To make a lasting impact in music requires effort, something both musicians and companies are forgetting with the album cover.