Album Cover Research

Here are a few of the debut albums I found for acoustic artists. It has come to my attention that they all focus on the artist; they all focus on the artist's face. This may be to help promote the artist and get them well-known faster.
After realising this I decided to look into debut albums from other genres and found that there is a trend for artists' first albums to have a clear image of the artists face - then after they become well known, albums then start to focus less on the artists appearance and may use other designs.

After deciding I would conform to the generic idea of using an image of the artist's face for my album cover, I came across Queen's first album (shown below). This uses images of the band members' faces, but in conjunction with a dark black background. This style gives the image a dark feel to it. As the album I am designing a cover for would be called 'Time For This Light To Shine' after the song I made a music video for, I thought it would be good advertising/promoting to incorporate the music video's narrative into the album cover. To do this I have decided to use the black background with faces idea from the Queen album. Instead of the blackness to give the album a dark connotation, I will use a image of candle-light with the faces to give the opposite feel; the use of light in the darkness, along with the name 'Time For This Light To Shine', gives the image the connotation of 'light' rather than dark. This 'light' with the two faces (the artist and his lover from the music video) suggests that there is a 'flame' between the two people (a relationship between the two people, as in the music video). Having the artist's face on the front cover and the girl's face on the back makes his identity stand out when people see the front cover - which helps to promote the artist and help people to start to recognise who he is. The black background also help make his face stand out, to attract attention to the album cover.