The 32-page booklet speaks volumes about the record label’s investment in album art, a shot in the arm for what is internationally seen as a dying art form. Locally, however, designers feel the music industry has only recently caught on. Reuben Rangraj Bhattacharya, creative head, Rock Street Journal, has created art work for underground bands and more recently designed covers for Joint Family, Undying Inc, Another Vertigo Rush and Cyanide.

“It’s only in the past four years that bands have realised, that in rock, the cover has to create an identity,” he says. Bhattacharya’s designs emphasise hand-illustrated artwork, a trait that characterises the work of several of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple’s great albums.

It isn’t surprising that several musicians double up as designers and almost everyone has a background in Fine Art or Graphic Design. Randolf Correia, of Pentagram and Shaa’ir and Func, believes complex ideas need to be stripped down for a successful cover. Both Correia’s creations, It’s OK, It’s all Good and the Love Album have been lauded for their simplicity. And neither design took longer than the Resurrection. “We got flack from our marketing people that customers weren’t able to read the English titles in a Japanese font (Love Album). But we had fun with the person buying the CD,” he says.

Producer and deejay Mukul Deora also conceptualised and executed the art work for his sophomore album, Stray. “My computer was a repository of myself and I wanted the album cover to reflect that,” he says. Deora rates Pink Floyd’s LP, Wish You Were Here as one of the best ever, followed closely by Underworld’s Second Toughest in the Infants and The Doors eponymous debut. “Internationally covers do say a lot, but in the end the music matters,” he says.

Manjiri Rajopadhye, at 40, a veteran of the local album art scene, says that the inverse is true for Mumbai. “Ours is not a structured market. There is so much clutter that album covers make associations in a nanosecond,” she says.

Rajopadhye combined her love for music and graphic design in 1997—around the year when music labels announced their arrival in India—by joining Sony music.