Zahra: music video: album covers

Collision Course Album Cover

This cover is pretty typical of a cover for a linkin park album cover as mike shinoda - one of the vocalists and guitar players in the band - is always on the project design team who also cover the design of their album covers. He draws anime so it isnt surprising that the album cover has an anime feel to it. The colour of the whole cover gives it an earthy feel as the prodominant colours are brown and orange. there are also quite a few musical images for example a keyboard, mic, speakers, guitars...

there isnt much text on the front cover jus the artist name and the name of the abum. the name of the artists is larger than the album name. the linkin park is also bigger than jay z's suggesting they had more of an input... they are both the same font style - stencil - but different colours. artist names: blue and wite, and album colour: orange. all the text is in the centre of the cover as well. any extra info is put on a sticker. on the back cover the headings are inthe same font as the text o the front jus a smaller size and in black. the rest of the text is similar to arial and either blue or black

On the front cover the text is infront of the images, however on the back the images are interrupted by a white 'splash' which is covered by the text. on the inside cover on the first two pges the pictures are the background for the text, however for the rest of the booklet the bottom of the pages are especially for the text and the rest of the pg is for pics of the band members etc.

The artists and their record labels are mainstream esp jay z who produces music himself etc. the cover shows the fact that they have the money because of the fact that the package not onlii contains a CD bt also a DVD as well qas d fact that the cover is a cardboard, 3 folded cover and the animation runs throughout the cover and is also consistent to the inside cover.

the potential target audience is oviously quite a modern audience ie late teens to early 30as mainly because of the anime-grafitti crossover. the grafitti represents jay zs supports while the anime feel is for the linkin park followers.

Album Covers #2

How id catagorise covers....by:

year
genre
artist
record label
prodcer
artist (designer of cover)
target audience
independently produced/mainstream

Album Covers #1

Typical Features

Front:

name of the artist
name the album
picture of the artist/symbol tat represents the artist
information about the tracks on the album, eg any bonus tracks and the names of those that have been released off the album (britney album shows the fact that 2 brand new tracks are included and because enhaced CD was quite new in 2000, it shows that it has the 'Lucky' video as part of the enharced CD, the Dutty Rock album by sean paul shows which other artists feature on the album for example Sasha on the 'im still in love with you' single)
if it has 'explicit content'
if a DVD is part of the package like the LP and JayZ Collision Course album

Back:

tracks and their number
bar code
artist/record label website
record label symbol
info about copyright
where it was manufactured
picture of the artist/symbol tat represents the artist

Inside cover:

pictures of artist
track info eg who wrote the lyrics, music, who produced it, length of track, who published it
a message from the artist thanking those close t them/who helped them get to where they are now
previous albums

According to wikipedia:
an album cover is a cover used to package commercial audio recordings such as the printed cardboard covers that were typically used to package 12" gramaphone records from the 60s through to he 80s whent the 12" record was the major formatg for distribution of popular music.

The cover serves 3 main purposes:

To protect the record, whose grooved surface was delicate
To advertise the contents, as the record had little room on its own record label.
To convey the artistic aspirations of the original artists

The covers i will b looking at are: