Music has color. Music has life. Music is art.
In our age of recorded music, artists have developed a new form of art alongside music.
Album art.
Artists build aesthetics that portray album themes and stories, and, depending on the genre, artists choose the most inspiring colors and compelling images to encapsulate their album story or their band/brand.
Since music artistry became accompanied by visual art through CDs and vinyl records in the 50s and 80s, the experience of music changed. The visual experience alongside the auditory now creates an experience more tangible, more relatable. We held albums in our hands as we slid the CD into our radios. And today, streaming services have changed their app designs to include mini images of the album art within playlists and on our player applications, creating a similar experience within the digital realm.
My Spotify playlists are full of aesthetic visual colors from my playlist picture to the mini album cover listed beside each song. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Some artists choose to remaster their album art and introduce variants in digital, vinyl and CD forms. For instance, Phil Collins, Disney’s Tarzan soundtrack voice, released his original album Face Value with a square black and white frame of his 1981 young man’s face from eyebrow to chin. In 2016, a variant was produced of his album art to match his aged 2016 face. How clever!
The band Scorpions also produced variants when their original album cover for Taken by Force came into controversy — two men were pointing guns at each other in a cemetery. The most common variant since is a cover with individual pictures of the five band members in the top of the frame, names underneath their rock style photos, “Scorpions” repeated above every face, and the album title in red letters on a black backdrop.
So it seems some variants are sparked by controversy, some for merely artistic or memorable reasons. But some even may be for economic reasons. Which begs the question, should artists be selling multiple variants for marketing reasons? The music industry may become more about album art and the visual than the music itself, stealing time and attention from the beauty of the art of music. Do artists really want this for their music?
In recent days Taylor Swift has received criticism for extensive variants for multiple albums, including 34 variants of Tortured Poet’s Department and continued releases of variants for Life of a Showgirl. Aside from the potentially pornographic quality of these album covers, Swift is being accused of greed. After all, variants do tend to raise over all sales as listeners may choose to purchase multiple vinyl art options.
All these variants from Swift imply a lack of satisfaction in the original work. Why are multiple upon multiple album covers being produced? One picture or album cover ought to suffice to tell the desired story.
That said, Swift is not the first to introduce such a wide range of variants, and she is not alone among her contemporaries. Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish among other top charts artists are selling variants, and the sales are signifying a ready market for such quantity of variants. Economically, the top charts artists are making smart moves. But how much do these economic decisions impact the experience we once had?
With the increase in variants, we seem to have entered a multiverse of album art that takes away from the value of the smaller, more relatable world of single album design. In these market endeavor, artists are changing the way music listeners enjoy their experience of music. They already have, and music as art may forever be changed.
