All of the above albums are covers that i believe to be very effective in different ways, they all all very different, starting with the Foo Fighters Greatest Hits cover (2nd left) the album cover consists of nothing but the logo, the band name, album name and a metal background, I feel that this makes it incredibly bold especially with the colour contrast between red and the colour of the metal, the logo jumps out of the picture and grabs you're attention.
The Gorillaz (1st left) and Paolo Nutini (2nd right) are fairly similar as they are both animations but of different kinds, the Gorillaz album is a 3D CAD (Computer Aided Design) image and the Paolo Nutini album is a 2D design. The Gorillaz album is very relevant to the band, as the artists don't star in any videos or album covers and have animated characters that make up the band in such situations, however the Paolo Nutini album cover much more random which shows that you never know what to expect from an album cover. The Dizzee Rascal album (3rd left) also includes animation in the way that the title of the album is actually the main feature and the picture of the artist is a small one in the corner, the choice of colours and font makes the album look very friendly and almost childish which is something very different from a lot of album covers out. The Them Crooked Vultures (4th right) is a computer generated image of a man with a vultures head, this is clearly relevant to the bands name and the colours work very well to make the cover stand out.
The Arctic Monkeys (4th left) and the Florence and The Machine (1st right) both feature close ups of people, however the Florence album is a close up of the artist, which is a popular feature on many albums, but the Arctic Monkeys album is not a close up of any of the artists in the band so there is not very much relevance to the band if you are just looking at the album cover.
The Hard-Fi (3rd right) album cover is something very different to a lot of stereotypical covers, it has no picture of the band, or anything relevant to the band, just a bold yellow background with writing saying "No Cover Art" along with the band and album name. I feel that the colours make the album cover what it is and the simplicity makes its so unique.
An album cover should reflect the genre of music, this is because although it is highly likely that a person thinking of buying an album will know the music, maybe because they've herd some previews on iTunes or have heard a single or two from the album but there is a likelihood of people looking at the album and not knowing what kind of music it is, because of this it is almost an unwritten law that the album cover should represent the style of music. Some stereotypical views of album covers with regards to this are R'n'B music will have a close up of the artist (usually preferred by record companies) under some kind of lighting because pop music very often uses the artists good looks to sell records especially with female artists due to the way society works (this happens in all genres but predominantly pop/R'n'B). This is shown below with a selection of album covers from some of the top selling pop music artists of recent times.
Dance music will usually have a dark background and/or include bright colours to reflect the sort of atmosphere in clubs. The genre of music very often has a model on the front of the cover, mainly because 'sex sells', also because there is usually much less singing in the songs, this means having the artist on the cover is not very important because they are not so associated with the music as Beyonce is with her songs.
Alternative/Rock/Indie genres tend not to use the artists faces either, certainly not as much as pop artists. Many of these albums will be predominantly artwork of a certain kind, this tends to be very colorful and bold.
The research I've done into this has been helped with the work that i have recently done on Andrew Goodwin's 'Dancing in the Distraction Factory' (1992) where he says that each genre of music has certain styles, there's demand from record companies to put the artists face on the cover, references to voyeurism particularly in females and that there can be inter textual references.
One more thing that I found when looking at different CD covers was that if a CD cover has a picture on then it very rarely has much else on the ocver, this makes the picture much more bold and the focus of attention.
I have also found that the size of a CD front cover is 12cm x 12cm
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