• There are a lot of different spines on albums, due to each artist in the music industry being different to one another – even if they are in the same genre.

• This is another part of the album that the artist can experiment with and be as creative as they want to be. For artists on major record labels, (the Big 3 – Sony, Warner and Universal) I think the creative aspect of the album would be very limited – or at least, more so than an independent label – because they would want the product to look really professional and sell as many copies as possible to ensure they receive the maximum profit available to them. For independent labels the music is the more important part of the product rather than the visual aspect of the product.

• This is why artists like M.I.A and Lady Gaga have very different looking albums, (M.I.A is signed to XL Recordings and Lady Gaga is signed to Universal Records), as well as their genres being very different.

This is an example of an artist that has followed a similar layout in their albums. The artist Nicki Minaj has had her name, album title, the labels she is signed to and the serial number in the same place on the spine of her albums up until her newest album ‘The Pinkprint’. I think this illustrates how she is a very professional artist, due to her albums looking similar to each other in their design. I really like this concept because it makes the albums relate, and makes them look appealing together. I think she has changed the design on her latest album because she had a dramatic change in her appearance and this is reflected in her album. This change makes her look a lot more professional and I think would make people in the music industry/general public respect her more and take her more seriously than they used to. She has also used a similar name to each of her albums, as each one contains the word ‘Pink’, which she has used because she calls her fans ‘Barbz’ and is known by her ‘Barbz’ as ‘The Harajuku Barbie’ (her longest lasting alter-ego).

These are some albums that I own which the design of the album is more of a simple layout rather than being too complicated and advanced. They all follow similar designs in that they have the artist’s name, album name and a serial number. ‘Bangerz’ and ‘Artpop’ both have the record labels on their spine of the album and ‘Glorious’ and ‘Pure Heroine’ don’t. I think this would be the type of design I would want my product to have because I think a more simple layout would look more appealing to an audience and would make people be more likely to buy the album. I especially like the ‘Bangerz’ album because of how Miley Cyrus’ name and album title is the largest font on the spine, and it features both the record label (the institution) that has distributed it and the serial number.

These albums are from artists which have tried to illustrate how they are different to everyone else in the music industry. For Ke$ha, Diana Vickers and Avril Lavigne, they have opted for the handwritten/messy kind of design. ‘Animal’ and ‘Let Go’ are two albums by the artists in which they portray their differences to other artists because Ke$ha is stereotyped as a partier and someone that is obsessed with alcohol and Avril Lavigne is the stereotypical goth/punk. These are both portrayed through the font they have used for their album design as Avril’s looks slightly like graffiti or an etching into a surface like a table – suggesting that she is a rebellion to society, and the font used for Ke$ha’s album looks handwritten which I think illustrates how she accepts the label she has been given and is using a font ironically to show that she doesn’t care about what people think of her and that music is more important to her than how her album looks. ‘Songs From The Tainted Cherry Tree’ is Diana Vickers’ debut album and the font is similar to that of a newspaper article and looks as though she has ripped up a magazine/newspaper and stuck different parts together to create this. Although the spine for Katy Perry’s album ‘Prism’ is quite simple, I have placed it in this section because she has used a triangle in place of the letter ‘A’, and M.I.A’s album ‘Matangi’ reflects her electronic/alternative music style through the use of a green and red colour placed behind the text.

The conventions.

1. Artist’s name.2. Name of album.3. Different coloured spine to colour of text.4. Serial number.5. Record label that has distributed the album

(on most but not all).

1.

2.

3.

5.4.