Visualizing Musical Style: Images of People
Album cover art began as a marketing tool, a way to make your product stand out among many others. Today, as we browse our streaming services, or flip through recordings at an actual record store, these images give us messages all the time. The ability of album covers to give the listener an immediate sense of the musical style contained on the recording makes them useful consumers (and marketers).
But what about the images communicates something about the music on the album?
One basic division in the types of album art is whether or not the subject is a person or something else. A glance at the recent releases (September 18, 2020) suggests that it is relatively popular right now to include an image of someone in one form or another, but there is a wide variation in the way these images of people are presented. The way people appear gives us hints about what the music might be like on the album.
Smiling directly at the camera
An image of a person smiling directly at the camera without a lot of apparent staging or other digital effects seems to communicate “authenticity” and the idea that the music is a personal expression. In the recent releases on Spotify, there are really only two covers that feature an individual smiling at the camera. Bridges by Mickey Guyton and the single “Long Live” by Florida Georgia Line. Both of these artists can be categorized as country, and the simple and direct visual of smiling at the camera reflect the appeal of country music.
Straight-faced
While relatively few covers featured an people looking at the camera smiling, many more album covers featured straight-faced individuals. Not smiling can communicate a range of things—seriousness, determination, depression, tiredness, masculine toughness... Maybe part of the appeal of the straight face is that it leaves us with more questions. It doesn’t give anything away.
What do you think of these recent releases with straight-faced folks on the cover? If it’s not the person’s face that communicates the style of the album, what is it?
Face obscured
More interesting, perhaps, are album covers that intentionally obscure the face. The music on recent releases with this style kind of cover tend to have electronic and psychedelic influences. Like the obscured humanity on the covers, the music tends to incorporate processed, echoey vocals and “non-human” electronic sounds.
What do you think? What kinds of covers make you think you’ll like the music? Do more of your records feature people, or not?
Let us know in the comments.
