Relationship between album cover design and music genres

The aim of the study is to find out whether there exists a relationship between typographic, compositional and coloristic elements of the music album cover design and music contained in the album. The research study involves basic statistical analysis of the manually extracted data coming from the worldwide album covers. The samples represent 34 different music genres, coming from nine countries from around the world. There are several parameters which are taken under consideration, including, among others, countries where the album was released, types of used fonts and letter size, the composition of the design, as well as the coloristic types according to the color analysis rules. The paper starts with a short background describing color theory and analysis, as well as color psychology, cultural differences in it, and basics of the composition rules. Also, the possibility to automatically recognize music genres is recalled, based on the previous study performed by the authors. Then the statistical analysis is performed to find out similarities and differences between the analyzed album cover design parameters, and music genres and how music representing chosen genres and countries of the origin of music performers differ from one another. Also, examples of automatic music genre analysis are recalled along with the metrics obtained. Finally, future directions of the study carried out are outlined.