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.
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.