Album cover design is a crucial part of each CD. Without it, your music album is no different from a book without its cover – it’ll look cheap and unappealing at all. Even though CD covers today show up as small thumbnails on technical screens more often than on the physical album jackets, they still work well in reflecting the music genre and the musician.
And if your music is as great as your CD cover, your fans will remember that and keep coming back for more. They may even go to spread your music by telling their friends about your beautiful artwork, and, thus, increase your CD sales. Crafting a good CD artwork needs time, but the result is always well worth the effort. Let’s see what else can boost this kind of relationship!
The First Impression
Regardless of how great your music is, people often infer their first impression about how the songs inside might sound just from taking a brief look at the cover artwork, which can steer the right subjects to your music and transmutes casual audiences into your fans.
A strong album cover makes a statement because this imagery is a one-time opportunity to make the good first impression. Averagely, a person will decide if they should buy a record of an unknown artist in 5 seconds. In such a short amount of time, they will either be instantly attracted to your cover artwork and pick it off the rack, or you’ll lose them immediately. Your sales will get a negative impact if the latter happens.
Therefore, an album cover is a vital marketing tool. The more eye-catching your music cover is, the better the chances you get to draw interest to your release.
A Short Summary
The initial purpose of cover artworks was to reflect the album’s content just by its image alone. These artworks serve as a gateway into what the buyers can expect from a music album, including what kind of musician behind such creativities.
Artistic Representative
The artist’s album cover represents them. But not just for one particular moment of their latest release, the cover becomes part of their branding as well. It can affect the way fans perceive their favorite artist and what they may expect to find when they take a look at the artist’s website or social media profiled.
Even though the music itself is the decisive presentation of a musician, people still need some kind of a visual element via the cover to encourage their purchasing will.
Something to Remember
First of all, artists build a strong visual identity. It will give them a chance to create their fans one-of-a-kind kingdoms to live in as well as to become invested in personally. Crafting a note-worthy visual identity will give the fans something tangible to hold onto during times like this when music consumption mostly occurs digitally.
Now your fan doesn’t really need to purchase your records, but there’s a chance that they might elect to – only when they have a specific emotional attachment to the CD cover, which has your picture – their favorite artist – printed on it. So, they just buy a physical memento in the form of the vinyl cover.
Now you understand the power generated from the combination of the famous artist’s appearance and their photo on the album cover.
Emotional Trigger
Besides an auditory experience, music is also a multi-sensory affair that triggers many types of feelings, memories, and emotions. When listening to music, people want to feel things in a certain way. If the music can make them feel in such a way, then the artist successfully has one more customer. And surprise! The album’s sleeve can surely help with that.
Particularly, the use of one single color should be sufficient to trigger a specific feeling or emotion. For example, depending on the context, the red color has always been suggested to spark strong emotions like love, passion, or anger. On the other hand, yellow boosts creativity, purple elicits nostalgia, and blue generates relaxation, etc.
Visual Attraction
In the end, what truly matters is the music. But an artist who produces good artwork with fine music will certainly go a long way in persuading customers to get to their CD. It’s just as well, for people buy the disc not just because of the music but also due to its visual appeal. An attractive packaging that has a catchy artwork can easily get buyers’ attention, answering one of the mysteries about what makes the vinyl top seller.
Proof of Confidence
A strong visual is one of the easiest ways to indirectly tell how important this work is to the artist. Fans can see how serious they have taken it via the musician’s careful investment in little details like an album cover before dedicating more time to jump into the music itself. It’s also been proved that when a fan is looking at a well-made CD jacket, which reflects the artist’s confidence, their interest level will certainly be increased.
Great, cohesive artwork/visuals not only contribute to the development of a fan base, but they can also help the artists attract the attention of significant industry figures such as the press and A&Rs, those units that weed through numerous of music submissions every day.
Conclusion
Your music’s sales depend a great deal on the album cover art. So, consider investing in this aspect properly by having a professional designer. Or in a much cheaper and quicker way, you can go to DesignBold – a free and user-friendly online album cover maker, and design a vinyl cover yourself with a variety of well-built templates provided by the tool!