Research & Planning Analysing CD Covers

Red Hot Chili Peppers- Blood Sugar Sex Magik

The front of this album cover is quite creative and individual; it breaks conventions because which ever way you hold the CD, the pictures and writing would still make sense. Red hot chilli peppers always have a very individual style in music and album artwork, this CD reflects this also.
The back cover has the lead singer, Anthony Kiedis’s arm showing his tattoo, which is also the red hot chilli peppers logo, with the songs hand written in his own writing across the back around the picture. This breaks conventions as it’s written in different sizes and styles and not neatly or in line. It has a very personal touch to it with the images being of the band, the singers tattoo and in the singers writing. The album artwork on the front was also designed by Henk Schiffmacher, a friend of the band.

The font that is added on the computer, which goes around the outside of the cover, is all the same font and size, which adds some consistency to it and makes it look professional.

Research & Planning Analysing CD Covers

Frank Turner - sleep is for the week Album Cover.

There is not much use of ICT on this album cover; it is hand drawn and very artistic and individual, similarly to Frank Turners music style, which is also very individual

This cover seems very busy, with the use of bright colours and abstract drawing and painting however if you look closely, its quite simple, with the only thing added to it is the title ‘FRANK TURNER SLEEP IS FOR THE WEEK’ so nothing too complicated has been used ICT wise.

The typical convention of the title being at the top in bold is there, adding simplicity to the busy background.

The history of the music video

Nowadays music videos are used for many different purposes, to entertain, to show off the artist, to give a better understanding of the song and to provoke a reaction from the audience. But most of all, music videos are created for advertising promoting, So the artist will sell more records and ultimately make more money.
Bohemian Rhapsody is often seen as the very first music video aired on television. This is because Queen couldn’t make it onto the T.V show Top of the Pops to perform their song, so instead of just not going, they decided to record a video to be shown on the programme instead. This was some what of a revelation for the convergence of television and music. Bohemian Rhapsody was the first video to be recorded on video tape instead of film and it was considered the first video to use advanced visual effects.
In 1981, MTV started broadcasting in America where ‘video killed the radio star’ was the first video ever played on that channel. To begin with, MTV played only music with music videos because before MTV there was no such thing as a channel dedicated to just playing music, music didn’t have a separate channel and was just shown in between or on other programmes. Some saw this as the beginning of an amazing new era; however others weren’t so positive and considered it to be the end of true musical talent as artists may become more appreciated for their looks rather than their voice, music and talent.
As MTV grew and became more popular, different MTV channels got created such as MTV 2, MTV dance and MTV hits. This is so MTV can hold a variety of different genres on different channels, to gain the largest possible audience, keeping them all happy and working around what the audience want.