Indie Rock Digipak Genre Convention

For my digipak I was thinking that I would not have a photo of the band on the front as I felt that usually rock bands tend to not. I was told this would be fine but I have to prove that bands in our genre, even in their debut album, generally don't have their faces on their album covers and that this is convention of the genre. So where better to start than with our original artist: the Arctic Monkeys.

As you can see from the image I handily assembled on the left, four of the Arctic Monkeys' albums do not have their faces on. This includes their first, second, fourth and most recent fifth album. Their third album admittedly is a photo of them but their faces are pretty obscured and to be honest I don't think it's a great cover.

I think part of the reason for this may be similar to why, as I blogged about earlier in the year for the music video research, many indie rock videos are very simple and often just a performance. It puts the emphasis onto the music itself and isn't obviously selling an image or a brand (although doing this is actually selling a different kind of image). Many indie rock fans like to think of themselves as being 'all about the music' and only liking so called 'authentic' music. The idea of having album art so different to the kind of generic pop packaging appeals to them as an audience and makes them feel like they've bought music not a promotional tool designed to make money.

I think this is reason enough for The Jewellers to not have to have a big photo of themselves on the front cover of their album. Although, I may feature photos of them elsewhere on the digipak so the audience can get a sense of them.

To really hammer home the point here are a bunch of rock album covers with no pictures of the artist on: