Research on Band CD Digipacks

Band CD covers are ways for artists to sometimes express themselves to further emphasise the meaning of either a particular song in the album or the whole album itself. 

A CD cover is also a way to bring synergy between the promotional/marketing side towards the content itself.

Band covers are somewhat logos or iconic pictures that define the artist and are there to make an impression on the audience thereby making it likely to be bought around the world. The CD cover can be as simplistic and as complicated as the artist wishes, but if this product is correctly marketed it will always have a big impact on its audience which makes it more likely to be sold.

However, one finds that in this day and age CD cover are getting more simpler and less important. To comparison, before, music artists were also involved with artist (paintings type art) which helped to produce a CD cover that would take the audiences attention and attract them in order to gain popularity. 

Pink Floyd 

This is Pink Floyd's front cover for the album "The Dark Side of The Moon" . It is extremety simple. It contained no band name not even the name of the album. This cover art was made by a graphic designer, Storm Thorgerson. He was involved in many other cover art work such as for the band Muse abd Led Zeppelin.

This cover was very unusual due to its simplicity. It didn't have anything that would be relatable to the band (as in an iconic symbol) nor did it have anything related to either the band's name or the name of the album apart from the word "dark".

However this was an album that became iconic for Pink Floyd. This became the album/cover that Pink Floys are still remembered by to this date.



This being Pink Floyd's back cover for the album "The Dark Side of The Moon". The back cover kept with the theme of its front cover. Although again, very simple it includes some common things that are usually included in CD digipacks. For example, this back cover includes the tracks included in the CD (which is the most common convention for digipacks), it includes by whom the album was produced by, it includes a copyright paragraph, a bar code, the band's website and the date for its UK release.



The gatefold for this same album, clearly also goes with the theme of the whole cover. It is black with the rainbow type feature running horizontally. As said previously, this album is a very simple design, therefore it is to be expected that this follows the same pattern in the gatefold. This gatefold simply inclued the reacurring theme of the outside bits and the lyrics to the songs that are included in the track list and/or in the cd itself.

Queen 

This is Queen's front cover for the album "News of The World". This was also a quite interesting CD digipack as it also includes actual paintings. For this front cover, the artist Frean Freas had agreed to alter his original paining which featured the same robot with a (random) dead man with the caption "Daddy can you fix it?..." to the robot hoding (and some falling to the ground) the four "dead" band members.

This cover however, does include the band's name and album name. Therefore following the convention of a vast majority of CD covers that include these two main features.



This is the back cover of this album. Its is the bottom part of the painting. As this painting must have been a vertically (rectangular) size, in order not to have emty space on the sides (if it were fitted in only the front cover), it was split in two so there is a continuity and same theme throughout the digipack. This back cover includes features such as the track list, the producer, the producing company and the record label. What i found interesting in this back cover is that it doesnt include a bar code as it would be normal to have. However i found that in different editions of this digipack it does include the bar code and i also found different editions that include a coryright paragraph.



This is the gatefold of this album. This art was made by the same artist that made the cover for this album. This gatefold is a painting of the same robot, but this time it is reaching for the (petrified) audience. I found out that due to showing the "dead" band members before and it showing a petrefied audience in the gatefold it created quite a controversy and one supermarket even refused to sell this album at first.

I find that this gatefold goes perfectly with the whole theme of this digipack. The digipack has its theme and it is represented in equal amounts by each of the features of this album. And although the paintings really stand out it is a very simplistic cover, as seen in this gatefold, the only thing that you can see is in fact, this painting.

However, today, technology has taken over and CD cover got less important. People will rather buy a song online and get it in digital form which enables them to easily transfer it to either their mobile phones or ipods for them to be able to listen to the song on a journey for example. The art covers nowadays tend to be the artists themselves that are displayed on the CD cover or a simple backgroung and lettering.

As much as the CD cover is still displayed on one of the most popular music download website (itunes), they dont matter that much aymore. One can simply type the artist or the song that they are looking for in the searchbar and it will pop up immediately and ready to download.

I thing that CD covers nowadays are not very interesting, or there is not much attention payed anymore. However they are still somewhat there and still have some effect on the market as far as sales go. Therefore i think that for the CD cover that i will be producing for Sleeping Serenity will remain simple, yet i hope that it will stand out enough for it to be easily recognizable and for it to portray the band.