Here's a valuable philosophy of mine that I've shared with some of you in the past. You know how you can't judge a book by its cover? While this is true, it's actually quite the opposite for album covers. If the album cover has any image (including those "digitally enhanced") of the artist on the actual cover…it sucks. This is true for about 96% of all contemporary albums (music since the 90's) displaying the artist or band directly on the cover.

This statistic of mine excludes live albums or compilation albums, but take some time to look at the CD's you own. Find one you know sucks and you don't remember why you own it. Look at the cover. I bet it displays a picture of the artist right in front for your eyes to gaze upon.

There's actually quite a simple explanation for this. In fact there are three:

1. The artist(s) lack any sort of artist ability and can't think of anything else to put on the cover of an album.
2. The artist(s) are severely infatuated with themselves.
3. The artist(s) are insecure with themselves.
   

What's more interesting is if you look deeper into these reasons, usually the specific genre of music is automatically placed into one of these three reasons.

Reason number 1 = Rock
Reason number 2 = Rap/Hip Hop
Reason number 3 = Pop and R&B

I did a google search for "worst album covers of all time", and every list I viewed showed significantly more albums with some sort of image of the artist on the cover than those without. Go try it for yourself.

So, a word of advice to any aspiring musicians out there…don't put an image of yourself on the cover. If you ever feel tempted to do so, re-write some of your songs, because your album most likely sucks if you can't think of anything better to put on an the cover than a dolled up version of yourself. If you want people to see you, just go to a mall or make a porno or something.

Thanks for reading.