Customer story with Bono G
The key to a successful music career lies in more than just the music. The way you market your music will have an equal–if not even greater impact–on your success. Including your album covers.
Without a hefty marketing budget, it’s possible to feel overwhelmed by this aspect of the music business. However, making your own album cover is now easier than ever. And Bono G, owner of Bonofide Productions, is here to share his secrets for creating an ideal album cover that fits your aesthetic and sells your music.
We sat down with Bono G to talk about his music production company and how he uses customized album covers to promote his music.
Can you tell me about Bonafide Productions?
Bonofide Productions is a video and audio production company. I am the owner. And I’m also a music producer for the company. I’ve been making music for over 20 years and started my own production company in 2018.
Currently, I’ve played a part in creating over 1000 instrumentals that are streaming across the world.
How wide is your reach?
Well, I have about half a million plays right now, so we’re definitely growing.
What sort of music do you produce?
I specialize in R&B, Hip Hop, Jazz, Soul, World Music, and a bit of pop music as well.
How do you promote your music?
I mainly use online promotion techniques to market my music.
I primarily use SongTradr as a distribution channel for my music, which is a third-party platform that helps promote my music through their website and social media. However, I do provide them with song graphics and album covers that I create and customize myself using PosterMyWall.
How important is a good album cover for music promotion?
I think it’s very important to have good visuals for your music. A quality visual helps people form a judgment about your music before they listen to it. They’re going to see the visual before they decide on whether or not to click play, so it’s necessary to have album or song covers that portray an image that represents your music.
How do you create a quality album cover for your music?
1.) Establish your music’s theme
Well, the first thing to do is create your music and evaluate how it makes you feel. What genre is the song? Is it fast or slow? Soft-tuned or loud? What emotions are you trying to evoke?
Once you’ve asked yourself those questions, you’ll have an idea in your head of what the song represents.
2.) Look for the perfect template to represent your song
Once you have that image in your head, you go about creating the album cover. I usually start the album cover process by doing a keyword search on PosterMyWall to look for the right album cover templates. For instance, if the song is about love, I’ll search for love related graphics and album cover templates. If I don’t have a specific image in my head and am open to ideas, I usually just scroll through the templates until I find something that I can personalize and change up to fit my song.
How do you customize your album covers to fit a song?
3.) Select a color palette that conveys your song’s vibe.
The first thing I do is change up the colors to match the theme of the song I want to promote. For instance, if it’s a love song, I want softer colors. If it’s a psychedelic rock or rap song, I’ll add some brighter colors and maybe throw in some extra patterns too.
4.) Integrate imagery that elevates the theme of your music
The second thing to note is the imagery. I don’t like to add too much, because I don’t want to clutter the album cover. But the right amount of imagery really helps elevate the theme of your song or album. A rock song with a slower tempo will probably include darker imagery to match the vibe, while a hip hop song revolving around cars and money will include dollar signs and fast cars.
5.) Select fonts that tie the other elements together
And the last thing I focus on is the name of the song or album. The name can either help tie in all of the design elements on the album cover, or break them apart. It’s important for the name to be written in a font that matches the vibe of the genre. I can’t add a tough hip hop song name in a soft, cursive font. And if the music and imagery is minimal, the name has to be presented in a very minimalistic way too.
Once the album cover is done, I send it along with my music to distributors like Songtradr and they help me promote my music.
6.) Give your fans a sneak preview of your album cover
That sounds interesting! And how do you know if an album cover helps your song get more plays?
Well, I generally try to promote snippets of my songs by sharing the album cover with a 10 second preview of the song on social media. If the song gets a decent number of clicks, that shows that people either liked the song for itself or were compelled to click on it by looking at the album cover.
7.) Convert your album cover into fan merchandise
Sounds great! Do you see any other uses for the album covers you create?
The biggest benefit of a great album cover is that you can use it to create more music merchandise. If the song has done particularly well, you can offer your fans more by resizing the graphic to create posters, t-shirt designs, and so much more.
This is a strategy I haven’t tried out yet but I plan to create some merchandise using some of my album covers soon.
What plans do you have for the future?
My future plans focus on growing more in the music industry, creating more music that people love, growing my production company so that I can help more musicians, and creating fabulous graphics to help promote my music.
Great! Thank you for joining us. We wish you the best of luck with your business.
New to PosterMyWall? Grow your music career today with fabulous music graphics, album cover templates, and much more.
Qasim is a senior editor at PosterMyWall. Qasim is a reader and writer during and after work, and likes to explore a wide range of topics and niches. Outside of work, he likes to meditate, listen to good music and journal.
