Music Promo Blog: Your CD Cover to Advertise Your Music, Another Opinion

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Your CD Cover to Advertise Your Music, Another Opinion

One of the Brobdingnagian Bards' early CDs, Songs of the Muse is going into it's second pressing. When I saw Christopher Knab's article "Your CD Cover is Your Best Ad For Your Music", I decided this was the perfect inspiration I needed to update the CD graphics.

I've been a fan of Christopher Knab for about as long as I've been a fan of Bob Baker. He is without a doubt one of the top Top 10 music marketers in my book.

Well, whenever I create graphics, I find too often that I forget a bunch of stuff. So this article serves as a great checklist. But when I read Seth Godin's Best-Selling book, Free Prize Inside, I realized that it was NOT a complete list!

In fact, the music industry in general has greatly missed out on an amazing opportunity to better sell CDs.

The idea I got came from the backs of books. Go grab a best-seller and turn it over. On the back, you will find the secret...

What did you find? You might've seen testimonials, a brief description of the book, or maybe even an exerpt.

You see, one of the problems I found with Songs of the Muse is that since we call our music "Celtic music." It wasn't till much later that I realized that in the Celtic music tradition, "songs" have lyrics and "tunes" are instrumentals. This album is all instrumental. So it was poorly named for the "Celtic music" world.

But if we use the back cover correctly, it doesn't matter!

The new back cover now lists songs titles along with a brief description of the ideal person who will enjoy this CD. It includes testimonials. And anyone who reads it will have all doubt removed as to if this is a vocal or instrumental CD.

Use Christopher Knab's checklist for a better CD graphics. Then think outside the box. What can you add to the cover that will make this CD sell better than ever?

--posted by Marc Gunn at Thursday, July 15, 2004
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