Cool International Album Covers

Album artwork is a huge part of music marketing. It entices the potential customer to reach out and buy the album as well as reflecting the genre, style or message of the album. However one image cannot appeal to everyone and so some albums are sold with different artworks depending on the country it's being sold in. Here are some reasons why:

Exclusivity 

A lot of music retailers in particular Target and iTunes like to offer exclusive deluxe editions of anticipated albums. This is to generate sales and attention to their store as well as the artist. This method of marketing is really effective as it benefits both the retailer and the artists as the store will generally work hard to promote the album. In some cases the artwork changes for the store. Some Target exclusive albums tend to incorporate a lot of red to reflect the branding of the store. 

Sensitivity and Politics
Sometimes what can be a perfectly normal image in one country can be highly offensive in another. This usually coincides with album covers that display nudity, whether it be full frontal or just have nudity in general. Sometimes album covers will be censored for example placing stickers over any inappropriate areas, cropping these areas or covering them up with an element of the picture. I've seen examples of this even in the UK, Sky Ferreira's album exposing her breasts is cropped and in some physical copies has stickers covering her boobs.

General Appeal

And one of the most common reasons for different covers in different countries is that different things appeal in different countries. US and UK album covers tend to be different quite a bit as do Japanese covers. In most cases the two covers for the different countries are completely different and unrecognisable from one country to the other. 

Below are some covers of albums you may know from different countries!

What album covers do you know of from different countries? Comment below to share!