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The album cover is the first impression you get of the album. People say "don't judge a book by it's cover", but how the hell am I supposed to pick an album out of a bazillion others? I go on youtube and there's an infinite feed of albums out there. I'm not gonna listen to every one of them. I need a way to filter them so that I would have a higher chance of picking something I would like. Album covers actually reflect the ideas and emotions behind an album therefore they can serve as indicators of something I could potentially enjoy. Yeah, sure, some albums may be extremely good but will have shitty covers and I'm gonna miss out on them if I always judge the book by it's cover, but realistically, what other quick method for picking albums do we get in 2024: the year of infinite album feeds?
I almost exclusively get into new bands by giving the first few bars of a random one of their songs a listen. If those bars suck but have potential not to suck I skip ahead and check more, if the song sucks but the band has the potential to still not suck I give the same treatment to up to two more of their songs. Sometimes I start this process by searching up "what is [bandname]'s heaviest song" and going from there. After so many years my ear is trained to judge bands pretty much perfectly based on those starting few bars. Back when I was playing in bands I'd always hear that a lot of labels judge whole artist demos based on the first few moments of the first song, at the time I thought that was a BS practice but once you've heard a gazillion bands in a genre you really are able to get an almost infallible sense of how good a song or band is from just brief sections of their stuff. I'm into so many musicians who's album covers I've never even seen.