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Plus with the rise in sales of vinyl (sales reached almost 12m in the US last year compared with less than a million in 2007), and more acts releasing their albums on that format, perhaps there’s yet another shift to come, offering more scope for experimentation. Far from falling away, album artwork is starting to exist as part of a new conversation. What this does show at least is that album artwork can still be used as a type of visual shorthand – that enough people care and understand the visual references to create viral content and keep it part of a broader discussion. Not least Madonna, whose Rebel Heart artwork – her face covered in black wire – was used to mock her after she inadvertently created her own meme by pasting the wire over the faces of historical figures. There have been casualties in this new wave of uncontrolled manipulation. Both design aspects became a visual shorthand for the album even when put into different contexts, with the colour scheme also used for merchandise – so you could walk around wearing a black sweatshirt with the word Surfboard written in pink and people would get the reference. A similar design simplicity was also used by Beyoncé – another meme-friendly artist – whose self-titled 2013 album featured a black background with her name in pink lettering.
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The seeming spontaneity of which has been hijacked by labels looking to engage a fanbase: Taylor Swift created an album art generator for her 1989 album, and new artist Shura is doing the same around her current single Touch.
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The fact that it’s easy to manipulate and is then instantly shareable also creates some free marketing. Its straightforward design works blown up to a billboard poster, reduced to a Spotify icon or worn on a T-shirt. During the campaign for his 2015 mixtape If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, fan art clogged up a large portion of the internet.


Suddenly the spontaneous, scrappy, fan art that would fill up Google image searches was overlapping with the official artwork, blurring the lines between the two.Drake’s ability to harness the engagement of his fans remains the most powerful of all of modern mainstream artists. To continue the DIY look, she then took a picture of the computer screen, which showed the reflection of herself holding up her iPhone (“for texture”, apparently). The cover – the word Judas above a cross on a black background – was apparently designed by Gaga herself using Microsoft Word. Perhaps the move into a more no-frills, graphics-lead aesthetic was the cover of Lady Gaga’s Judas single, which did away with the previous Nick Knight photography and facial augmentation of the Born This Way campaign. So what can the images used by artists in 2016 reveal?Ĭover artwork for Adele’s album 25. Starting with the practicality of the 1940s sleeves – which were used to protect the record – to the punk and prog experimentalism of the 70s through to the bold graphics and controversies of the 80s and 90s and the cleaner lines of the 2000s, artwork offers a broader reflection of the cultural and technological landscape. Its visual complexity was at odds with the way in which fans were consuming music at the time, and is a curious exception in the evolution of the album cover which tends to mirror the changing formats and consumption methods of the time. The timing for such an aesthetic switch was curious: by the early 90s, music formats had shrunk from the larger canvas of vinyl to cassettes and then to CDs, so trying to spot the artwork’s myriad of hidden treasures – Jackson’s monkey Bubbles, the plasters he wore on his fingers, the minuscule picture of him from the 1984 Grammys – on a tiny cassette cover was like a game of Where’s Wally. It represented a massive departure from the simpler, more posed artwork of Jackson’s previous albums (1987’s Bad was just him, a snazzy zipped jacket and some red spray paint). I was equally obsessed with the artwork an intricately detailed, multi-layered tableau created by artist Mark Ryden over six months. Given to me as a present on Christmas Day, 1991, I played the cassette constantly on a chunky Walkman and subjected my family to repeated plays on long car journeys. The first album I properly owned was Michael Jackson’s Dangerous.
