I wonder if ABB would have sold better had they had a better cover? Perhaps a cover with a better photo of the 4 as well as the band name? There are plenty of cool photos on rollngstones.com ABB jukebox they could have used.

I am sure that some people would have bought the album who are not hard core fans but didn't because they didn't really "notice" it. It doesn't jump out at you from the rack. The CD is so small now that you can't even tell it's Mick or Keith unless you actually pick it up and look at it closely.

Good point!

At first I thought this was silly but I believe you may have a point. Unless you are looking for it you wouldn't know it's them. But then again, you wouldn't on most of their other albums as well. (No Security comes to mind, horrible cover)

Yeah I agree also. I thought the Stripped and No Security covers were pretty good, but the Stones haven't had a good studio-album cover since Some Girls.


Karl

no security was the worst cover ever! 2 homily people on a cover?!

i liked the undercover cover.

The voodoo lounge cover is nice

i dont think the cover would make that big of a difference in sales....radio play and promotions where its at...dont think a good cover would hook in the youth market these days...best wishes all

J.J.Flash Wrote:
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> no security was the worst cover ever! 2 homily
> people on a cover?!
>
> i liked the undercover cover.


I loved the No Security cover. Tell me you haven't seen a hundred freaks like that at a Stones show. It's like that old saying, 'a picture is worth a thousand words'.

Karl

ur right-there's freaks at a stones show. the 2 on the cover are hideous

I think sales are partly down do to the ease of CD burning.

Also, I think as the Stones have gotten older - the photos tend to try and hide their age by darkening the photos, making them black and white photos or making the Stones hard to see etc...

I think Still Life cover is good!

i didn't like the cover from day one. and i was the only person who hated it
People gave me such crap!
LOL

but anyways The last great cover (imo) was IORR and Some Girls
i don't know what they could have done... maybe a gaxaly of tounges or something

They need a hook on the cover...such as Sticky, Beggars, Some Girls, Who's next, etc...

They had some great covers... Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Tattoo You, Sticky Fingers, Some Girls, Still Life... All very artistic. This one is pretty cheap. It could have been allot more.

abb is their best cover since some girls - i think it is fantastic

I don't think a cover is going to make or break sales. Look at Back In Black. Can barely make out the AC/DC logo let alone the title. I think this is where Spinal Tap got their inspiration for their Smell The Glove album cover! To quote the movie "how much more black can this album cover get? None, none more black, it can't get any blacker"!

"I'm not a great lover of the title for this tour and record. But what it conjures up is fantastic, and that's what sold me.

Charlie Watts 2005

I dont like the fact that you cant see the song titles
you almost need a microscope to see the them , its ridiculous
although i dont think this has anything to do with sales

I like the photo below.
Wóuld have been a great cover.

But I like the one they put out, too.

Btw: The artwork in the booklet is really poor.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2005-09-24 01:01 by TooTough.

I actually like the ABB cover a lot, because it has a kind of old fashoined feel to it. Looks like a cover from the sixties or early seventies.

If they wanted a cover that catches your eye in the shops, a lighter, simpler cover would have done the trick. The best (relatively recent) cover in that respect is the one of Voodoo Lounge. Forty Licks also was a decent one (light one with the trade mark logo).

compare:




Also I would use the tongue/lip design more often in marketing campagnes. It's one of the best known logo's in the (music) world. The new "melting tongue" looks pretty cool to me, but has lost the significance the original has. The Forty Licks version was better.


I don't know wether it has any influences on sales, but I personly would have selected another cover (and tongue/lip design) for A Bigger Bang. It works for me, as a fan, but does it attract enough attention?

regards, E.

KSIE Wrote:
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>
> I loved the No Security cover. Tell me you
> haven't seen a hundred freaks like that at a
> Stones show. It's like that old saying, 'a
> picture is worth a thousand words'.
>
I agree totally, and the best is yet to come: The two people on the cover are Austrians! (And this may be the reason, why Austrian Mail in turn isssued four special stamps showing each of the Stones some years later *lol*.)

As to the question, whether ABB would not have had better sales figures if its cover would have shown the classic Stones tongue with THE ROLLING STONES in bigger not possible capital letters underneath, I don´t think that would have made any difference. See, when I was young there was this vinyl record with nothing but an abstract prism on the cover, with some coloured rays of light, and that was it. No title, no band´s name, not even pictures of the band on it. Huh, I forgot the band´s name and can´t remember how they called this album, but I can promise you something: The record I just described sold nearly as many zillion times as Pink Floyd´s "Dark Side of the Moon"!

It´s the music that sells a record. Period.




Do the girls still scream, when you perform on stage? KR: Not on stage, but when I perform, yeah.

ABB has their best cover since Sticky Fingers.

JumpingKentFlash

ABB has a great cover. Their best cover for a studioalbum since Some Girls (I actually also like the Steel Wheels cover a lot).

Sales aren't that bad for the stones. The entire cd-market had changed since their last album. You can't compare it just to their other albums, way too much has happened. They are doing pretty well.

Some of you are comparing with albums like Back in Black or Some Girls and how they didn't have trouble with sales. That is not apples to apples. Those were ONLY albums. ABB would be quite different if we had no CD's and just a large album to catch the eye.

I do agree that the tongue should be utilized more.

Remember Metallica´s "Black Album" (the one with Enter Sandman on it?). You hardly can see anything else but a plain black cover. No bandlogo, title or anything on the first view. Till this very day it´s their by far most successful album ever. They´ve sold millions and millions of it.

To me it´s all a matter of taste. Personally I don´t like the ABB cover.

I like the cover but,it could only help and not hurt the sales if it were more eye-catching.One idea that could work would be just a bright orange boarder around whatever they wanted to use as cover art.This is why retailers use noticable colors for signs for clearance merchandise etc..

I agree with TooTough about the beautiful portray he posted. No lying or cheating about the age of the guys, everyone knows it... It would have worked much better, but would have had to be used a bit like Black & Blue (Mick and RONNIE winding up on the front part? Why not!). Use it like a mini-LP, as a fold-out cardboard cover. No text, no artist name (right, they don't need it), no microscopic song titles... A re-thinking of the CD cover concept is a serious need IMO for the music industry.
As it is the aBB cover is beautiful (attitude, photo), but like tons of CD covers today, it's almost irrelevant. Voodoo Lounge is also agreat concept (in fact, much more elaborated than aBB's minimalist approach), but it didn't work for me as a CD cover. Probably a lot better for the tour posters, etc.

I think the cover is cool. Consider ...

They've put out, what, eleven thousand albums? So you go to the record store, looking for the new Stones album. What to do? Well, heck, go to the section marked "Rolling Stones," sift through the rack, come across this cover you've never seen. You say "Dang, that looks like a picture of Mick and the boys." Upon closer inspection, you see that, indeed, your guess is correct. Then you look at the plastic wrapping, and dang again, it says right there "The Rolling Stones - A Bigger Bang." You say to yourself, "Self, isn't that the name of the new Stones album that I'm looking for?" Well, yes, I believe it is. So on the way to the cashier, you actually do like this: "Hey, pretty cool cover for a CD. They didn't put a title on it. Dang, they didn't even put 'The Rolling Stones' on it. Wow, that's actually pretty cool."

When it's all said and done, you already know what the band looks like (well you do, don't you?), so you don't need the CD to have the name of the band on it. You don't really even need a title on it, do you?

It's just another in a long line of master-stroke marketing by Dem Rollin Stones. After all, this is a band whose "lapping tongue" logo is an icon that's instantly recognizable worldwide, write up there with Coca-Cola and that little multi-colored striped Apple and many others. The Strolling Bones, after all this time ... hey, they know what they're doin.'