“Should I look similar or different?”, is a question that needs a lot of attention, awareness, and a lot of honesty; because the answer may end up being the opposite of what you were thinking in the first place. This is a question you should ask yourself many times when imagining your next album cover art. It will help you reach much quicker to the album cover design you need.
Musicians often wish to be unique, but this comes with a challenge. If you look too unique, the target audience you are aiming for might not be able to recognize you. If you are a singer-songwriter who is looking for an album cover that will make you stick out, and if you end up choosing something so avant-garde that the singer-songwriter audience group assumes your album to be a neo-classical music album, you would end up losing audience instead of earning recognition in your field. This is why, no matter how unique your sound might be, the genre you believe you belong to (if there is any) must affect your choice of album cover design.
On the other hand, if you look too similar to content that is part of your “inspiration list” you may risk staying under that content’s shadow. Most people tend to think that it is a bad idea, but one must be aware of the position they have in the ladder of a genre as well. In short; until people can recognize the style of music based on your album cover, it will have to go the other way around. Unless you are not the inventor of a style, there will be some resemblances in your album cover art to other musicians’ album cover art. These may be independent artists, or label-produced, high-end artists, it doesn’t matter. So, looking like “them” doesn’t have to be a bad thing! It can make you belong.
Looking similar to anyone more famous than you can have bigger advantages than the contrary. Being easily recognized by your target audience certainly can not be a bad thing. All we know, the target audience that you aim to get maybe bored of listening to the same band over and over to reach that sound style and quality. Your album design, being similar to the artist they are already a fan of, can easily make your music heard by the exact audience you wish to have.
Yet again, if your sound indeed is unique, and that is the whole point of your musical existence, you should look for album cover art that does not ring any bells in anyone’s mind. Because if your cover design looks a bit too heavy metal, the indie audience may shut you out. If your album cover art looks a tad too classical, the hardcore contemporary audience may assume you are “easy listening”. This is where the crossover album design styles start entering the game; album art which can hint that you have a heavy side with a contemporary touch, but still can be considered serious by the classical music audience.
The year is 2021, and we all are hardly admitting to ourselves. The music scene has never seen so many individual productions as it did last year. More results of this independence will appear. As much as the one-person formations, more unexpected collaborations will show up. With what we all are still going through, the world has become a lonelier and smaller place at the same time. People who would not collaborate otherwise found themselves through social media, without questioning the chances of them performing together one day or not. In a year where music genres are getting harder to pinpoint and recognize, at AlbumCoverZone we are adapting ourselves to it as well. Our design team is working hard to produce covers that are especially designed to blend into a style of music that is already established, to be used by flourishing artists that are diving into the music business from scratch; and album cover designs that shout the style of music by its look. The same designers are also working hard on designing album covers for the music that is hard to define with just a few words. So, go ahead and take a look at our collection!
