Who Are All These Alternate Album Covers For?

The past few months have been dizzying if you’re the kind of fan who likes your albums neat, simple, and anchored by one iconic cover. Instead, we’ve been hit with a barrage of alternate album covers—some before we’ve even heard a single track (*cough* *cough* Taylor Swift).

Sabrina Carpenter rolled out multiple cover visuals for her seventh studio album, Man’s Best Friend, while Taylor has unleashed an entire pack of alternate covers for The Life of a Showgirl months before its Oct. 3 release date. She even got iTunes' X account, an account that hasn’t posted in six years, to post about another variant of the cover.

It doesn’t stop there. Cardi B, never one to miss a marketing opportunity, dropped a special-edition cover for her forthcoming album, Am I The Drama, highlighting the conclusion of her civil case. The cover features the many faces/memes that came out of her testimony.

Again, it doesn’t stop there. Doja Cat is the latest to jump on the trend, offering up, to date, at least four covers for her new album, Vie. While it’s more prominent in music right now, last year, it felt like nearly every woman in rap tested out alternate covers when the originals didn’t land with fans.

“I do not like artists releasing alternate covers. Pick one cover and stick to it,” Sam Murphy, content creator and host of The Pop Pod, said in a TikTok video about the phenomenon. “There have been so many alternate covers, and these albums haven’t even come out yet.”

Murphy’s frustration makes sense. There was a time when fans were lucky to get a second album cover if a deluxe edition appeared months after the original release.

“But at the moment,” Murphy added, “it feels like we’re getting five or six covers before the album has even dropped.”

Alternate covers have gone from collector’s items to full-out industry strategy.

“Not releasing variants with a die-hard fan base is leaving money on the table,” Brian Zisook, co-founder of Audiomack, said in a tweet.

But not all artists are sold on the idea.

“I can’t even express to you how wasteful it is,” Billie Eilish told Billboard in 2024. “I find it really frustrating as somebody who goes out of my way to be sustainable and do the best that I can and try to involve everybody in my team in being sustainable—and then it’s some of the biggest artists in the world making 40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more.”

All of .@DojaCat’s vinyl variants so far for her upcoming Album ‘VIE’.

This is the first time in her career releasing multiple covers.https://t.co/NtZT0j3ZJw pic.twitter.com/bWHegqSXJP
— Doja Hubs (@DojaHubs) September 10, 2025

The sales game

For labels and artists, that sort of sales logic is obvious. Die-hard fans will buy every version of an album, sometimes just for the sake of owning them all. The more vinyl variants or deluxe covers you put out, the higher those first-week and general numbers climb. And in the music industry, perception is everything. Selling 250,000 “units” in week one looks better on paper, even if a good portion of them owe to people buying the same album four times.

When the music doesn’t match

Sometimes alternate covers feel like a distraction from the music itself. Take Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend: The original cover, featuring her on all fours while a man “plays” with her hair, inspired outrage and spawned endless debates online. How could she release this kind of cover in this political climate? Is she into kinky stuff? This is what’s being talked about instead of the actual music.

Weeks before release, Carpenter dropped a new version, jokingly calling it the one “approved by God.” It may have salvaged the optics, but it also highlighted a deeper issue: Now that the music is out, it isn’t connecting as strongly as her previous album did. When the songs don’t resonate, all the clever rebranding in the world can’t mask it. If the albums feel lackluster, labels are repacking a product that wasn’t exciting in the first place. If the original image doesn’t land with listeners, the thinking seems to be, “Why not try five more?”

The case for one cover

And yet the artists who commit to a single image often end up with the most enduring cultural artifacts. A great album cover is about making the music a timestamp moment, a piece of iconography that carries the weight of an entire era. Think Beyoncé’s Renaissance. Think Charli XCX’s Brat. One image, burned into fans' memory, that crystallizes the music forever.

“It's the image that really stands for what the album is,” Murphy said in his video. “And when you think back through the most iconic covers in pop music, I'm thinking of Frank Ocean's Blonde really stands out to me. It's meant to stand as this symbol for what the album is, what the album sounds like, and what the album wants to represent. And the more covers you release, I think, the more that it dilutes that power and just kind of steps on the art of an album cover in general.”