Analysing Record Covers

While digging through my attic, I stumbled across mountains of records, some of which date back to the 1960's. When looking at these old records, you can see similarities between records and digipaks, and how digipaks have evolved from record covers.

This record sleeve for Iron Maiden is very interstice as instead of having photos of the artist, it is a cartoon design with implications of death and dark themes.

Record sleeve

However, when looking at the CD/Digipak of one of their recent albums, you can see that there has  been very little change. They have stuck to the dark cartoon design. The only striking difference is the slight change in logo colour and size. On the Digipak, it is more obvious who the album represents are their band name is in huge bold letters.

Something else I noticed on the back of most albums was that they often contained little facts or comments from the artist or band. For example, on the back of Madness, each song has a comment from one of the members, explaining how the song originated. This gives the album more use, as well as allowing their audience to know the back story to their songs. When speaking to my father about this, he commented that he feels that he is in an "exclusive" group as not many people will know of these facts as they do not have the album. 

When records were all the range, most record creators were aware that their target audience was young people. Therefore they tried to more directly pander to them, while offering help and advice. For example, this album is advertising childline, something that most CDs/Digipaks do not do anymore. This is a interesting feature as it shows that in the past there was a focus on protecting their listeners, where as now, in the present, most producers are interested in how to sell their products instead of the audience's wellbeing.