Visual art in music industry

 Since our early age, people were always influenced by many different factors, which make behave every social generation. Like for example religion, education, family or media. These are the spectrum of different forms of communication with masses.
 In nowadays the strongest influence, which we are getting from every day life is media. Music has always been important part of human culture. It is the way of visual culture. The way in which artist wants to tell some message or share his thoughts with audience. Music industry is one from the biggest part of cultural economic base. We are always in interest of music from many reasons. From one way it is a type of art which leaves some emotional feeling on us. As type of music has changed over the decades, even whole music industry changed as well. Buying music records and cassettes or CD's is now past, because of streaming by internet and online stores. This connection between music industry and internet community has been apparent because of common fact with the evolution of the internet technology. As first who brought this idea to the public was Apple Computers, by its iTunes music store.

Example of psychedelic album cover

 We can see how much visual art touched music industry by every time period. From first simple album covers with basic text and image on it, until more stylish design artworks, fonts, photographs and whole package content. The big change of covers design is visible in 60's, where the term 'psychedelia' takes place. It was the new popular music genre, which is inspired by altering experiences of psychedelic drugs. Time by time 2D artwork images turned more to 3D covers. As the good example is Dj Kid Koala, whose covers are based on his own graphic illustrations, which already are short comics stories for each of his CD.  Even from simple look on album cover, we can nearly recognize the period that it came from.  It is obvious from style of text or photograph, also from fashion or hair style of artists. Each period has its own visual aesthetics. Because all these designs have changed, most of favorite artist's records are pretty rare  as historical artifacts. As critique of culture and arts Raymond Williams called it 'historization'.  This definition  is quite highly used in music industry at present. It means to redesign some famous records into special or limited edition with variety of bonuses which are included. So simply sell it again and make it more value for buyer.

Kid Koala album cover

Even many artists are trying to do same thing by theirs personal or visual style to emulate other music idols. Raymond said that for all cultural movements are three faces. The first is 'emergent', what is actual product. The second one is 'appropriation', so it becomes business product. As third is last step, which is 'historization', turn product to historical artifact. As it was all the time, music industry has been changing its form and has been shaped to fits each generation of people, theirs life styles and needs.