by Greg Wilson
Everyone knows that the best way to get people that have never heard your music to want to buy it note unheard and spend their personal hard earned cash on your product and take it home and fire it up, is to grab them by some means. Obviously if you are talking about someone that is just perusing CDs in a store or over the Internet there is only one way that you are going to be in competition with the national releases. You packaging has to be as attractive and as catchy as the multi-million dollar products that the majors are releasing.
I know, you don’t have millions of dollars to invest in your packaging. Chances are you blew most of your budget on the recording and you are tempted to save the money and just have the guy that the bass player knows who has a little talent in that area design the cover for the release.
To quote a guy in the Nick Nolte film “Don’t you do it Jack!”
The worst thing that you can do is to skimp on the first thing a prospective buyer will see. It would be a lot like the folks at Ford making the Mustang just a square box. It might be the best running machine in the world but unless someone buys it, it doesn’t matter.
This is where a graphic artist is worth his or her weight in gold. They can absolutely make or break the project so don’t trust it to just anyone. In fact the more mockups you can get from various people the better your end result is likely to be. There is only one band that I can recall that actually was able to put absolutely nothing on the cover of an album and still have it sell. Remember the “White Album”?
But even with the Beatles, stop and take a hard look at the Sgt. Pepper album. I’m not talking about on the CD, try and find a copy of the actual vinyl and look at all the intricate detail that went into that graphic artists cover design. Every square inch of the cover relates to something and it all helped to spark rumors about things going on in the band, like Paul’s death and those things sparked sales like a just so-so cover would not have done.
Places like myMusicCircle are great choices to find untapped talent for things like the graphic artist for your next project.
