Analysis of album covers

Album artwork is very important to an artist and gives indications about the type of music it is that they produce. It also is a selling point to encourage costumers to purchase their product.

Here is an example of famous album artwork from the band Green Day. The text dominates a lot of the cover so that it is clear who the artist is. The text is in bold font that really stands out to the eye to give it quite a harsh look. The colours used are black, red and white. The black and red suggest it is from the Rock genre as these colours are normally associated with the music. The image of a bloody heart also suggests it is from the Rock/mental genre because of the negative images associated with a 'broken' heart.

The next cover i want to look at is one from the artist 'Nicki Minaj.' The main part of the cover is taken up by the close up image of the artist. She has very extravagant make up on using lots of different colours, mainly pinks though. The background behind her consists of paint splatted walls in bright happy colours. This suggests that her music is from the pop genre because of all the bright pretty colours that are normally used in a pop music video. Bold colours, especially pink are associated with this genre of music as it's very fake and happy like the songs they sing. Again the colours of the text are mainly pink and if not are in a rainbow colour selection, to suggest the music is happy, fun and probably the sort of music people would like to dance to. The font is made to look like it has been painted on to co inside with the paint splatted wall in the backdrop of the photo of Nicki Minaj.

This next cover to the left is from Rihanna's album 'Talk that Talk.' The cover is quite simple, it just consists of one picture taking up the whole cover. There is an 'R' in the corner to stand for Rihanna. She is such a famous artist that she only needs her initial to be recognised as who she is. Having her picture as the cover also promotes her as an artist even further. The misce-en-scene in the picture could be seen to encourage the viewer to look at Rihanna in a sexual way. The animal print top and the bright red lipstick she wears encourages voyeurism. She also looks directly into the camera, sticking her tongue out too encourage this further. The title of the album is writing in small typed font along her arm to not distract away from the main image of Rihanna. The cover might not be as obvious that it is from the pop genre as Nicki Minaj's because it doesn't use the pretty pink colours she does but the mise-en-scene and everything about the image of Rihanna suggests it is from the pop genre.