16. CD Cover Research

Conventions of a music CD Cover.

Here is the CD cover from The Script:

In this album cover we don't get to see a location, this keeps the audience in the known, it also keeps with the abstract hands as the audience may not understand what the meaning of the hands are. Having no location can be mysterious and makes the audience think about why there is no location. The artist have chosen to show us these hands. The front of the album is to hands holding each other, this could be telling the audience that the band are close friends and that they are one with each other. It helps show the audience how close they are. 

Here is the CD cover for James Blunt:

The font used is very stylish and exciting, he could have used arial which would have made it seem formal and boring, by using this font it shows the audience that it is an exciting stylish album which is not formal and therefore is great to buy. The location for the album isn't very clear as we are not seeing a main focus from the area he is in. We would suggest that it is in a different country as the color of the house and the type of trees surrounding the house. By him using this different country he could be trying to tell us in a discretely that he has gone to this place to get away with his kid and the album will help us get away if we need to. 

Here is Mumford and Son's CD cover:

When first looking a the images you may think about where they are and why they are there. We would think of them as being abstract, but once we look into them we can start to pull out different bits of information. The shop we see is in London, this could tell us that the artist are British and are proud of this. It could also tell us that this is a high quality album as London is one of the worlds most important capitals. 

As you can see in all three CD covers there are very similar conventions such as the abstract images which link to the album by a song or a message, the fonts used are all unique and exciting. The information that is given is mostly the same. Things like the record company and the list of songs on the album appear. There is always a bar-code on the back of the cover. However on the Mumford and Sons CD cover the artists appear on it, this doesn't happen on the two CD covers. This could be because Mumford and Sons are not as well recognized  by the public yet so they want to try and get their name associated with them and their faces. But even when they appear they look like shop dummies, which still gives off the confusing strange feel about it like the abstract places and objects used on the other CD covers. The covers help shape the audience perceptions to the artists, this will help sales for the artist as the audience will want to hear the music after seeing the CD covers.