The Album Cover

It’s been ages since I bought a film’s audio cd/album but I thought of putting this to an end and bought the album for Anurag Kashyap’s “Dev D”. Expectedly, a lot has changed in the way “Album Covers” are designed now. As I was checking the album cover out, I happened to get my hands on the album cover of recently released Akshay Kumar starer “Chandni Chowk To China”. Lets see how the two covers compare to each other in terms of design and their offerings.

Dev D’s Album Cover

1)  Back(internal) side of the cover

Page One: This page is divided into three parts
1) Ring back/Caller tunes: This part gives you relevant codes for Airtel, Vodafone, Idea,Reliance, Tata Indicom, Virgin and Aircel
2) Ring back tunes(BSNL): This part has relevant codes for BSNL.
3) Theme: This part has the code to download movie theme.

Page Two: This page is divided into seven parts
1) Animations
2) Color Logo
3) Wallpapers
4) Buy songs(hungama mobile)
5) Listen to songs: You can listen to full songs from any of these providers, Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, Reliance and Virgin
6) Download Ringtones from Airtel, Reliance, Tata Indicom, Idea, Vodafone, BSNL, wap.hungama.com
7) International Audience: Now people from US, Canada, UAE, Malaysia, UK and Mauritius can also download caller tunes, ring tones etc. This section has country specific details.

Chandni Chowk To China’s Album Cover

Actually this isn’t the album cover but this comes inside the album as a separate brochure.

Part one of the front side:

Part two of the front side: This part has codes to download dialer tunes from Tata Indicom, Airtel, Vodafone, Spice, Reliance, Idea and Aircel

Part one of Back side: This part is divided into four parts
1) Color Logo:
2) Animation
3) Wallpaper
4) Theme

Part two of the Back side: This part is for international audience to download ring tones etc. US, Canada, UAE, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and UK

Though I was never interested in “Chandni Chowk To China” and can’t ever compare it with “Dev D”, I loved their album cover/brochure a lot over the other. Here’s why
1) It’s a five page brochure as compared to two page one of Dev D.
2) It’s separate from the cover and therefore doesn’t need to be discovered by taking the album cover out from the cd case.
3) It’s designed and organized a lot better, thus way easier to read.
4) Also, I like the fact that they’ve made the ring tones available in two more neighboring markets i.e Pakistan and Bangladesh other than supporting an extra provider (Spice).

Though DEV D’s album has a free brochure containing stills of its cast I believe they should’ve used that space better. What do you think ?

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4 thoughts on “The Album Cover

  1. Karthik S

    Excellent observation! We’ve indeed come a long way from those lowly cassette covers! The overdose of ringtone and mobile related information is a necessary evil since most record labels make a lot of money out of this.

    Check out the Delhi 6 CD cover too…its got lyrics (like many other soundtracks), but there’s a small note by Rakeysh Mehra on the beginning of each lyrics, about his experience on each song…or just a note of what he thought. Its small things like these that really matter in the fight against piracy. These days you perhaps need to create a work of art that doubles as a collectible to ensure that your CD is bought – besides making good music.

  2. mayank

    Yes, gone are the days when the music album just had the cd and a cover having mini poster and list of tracks. People need more reasons to buy the album than just songs.

    That’s cool.I asked for Delhi 6’s cd too but it hadn’t hit the stores till a couple of days back. True, apparently there’s a mirror with Delhi 6’s promotional material(nice idea). It would be interesting to see how film makers use the album for marketing their film amongst other things.

  3. Tarasa

    I clicked through expecting a music comparison LOL

    All I can say is – I have always been a little disappointed when the cover is full of ringtones info and not much else, since I couldn’t utilize them on Verizon network here in the US. But here is Dev D with options for me!

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