I found it quite difficult researching album art as an industry, mainly because it seems to me that there aren't too many considerations which have to made. the only requirement really is that whatever the artist comes up with has to be square. This is in fact part of the appeal to me, as I typically make work without too much consideration of how it will be applied to a specific context. The only other particularly important consideration would be the use of type, which is something I did want to work on in my own work, but even then there are so many approaches one could take with regards to that and no restraints upon the use of type imposed by the industry.
Partly as a result of this, and also partly as a result of the fact that at any given time there is a huge amount of music with inherent differences, there also doesn't ever seem to be trends in album art massively. The only trends evidenced tend to be genre specific trends, and even then they don't seem that prominent.
I suppose the only other type of industry research that would have been worth looking into would have been more of a materials/ assembly line process focus, but that type of stuff is probably unlikely to ever be all that relevant to me as an illustrator, unless I'm dealing with a vinyl cover which will be made out of a specific and/or unusual surface which would affect how a potential design will work being printed on it (e.g. glow in the dark, clear etc.)
My research then mainly consisted of gathering together album art which I particularly liked and simply thinking about why I liked it. Even then, there were lots of differences, and all it usually boiled down to was whether or not I liked the design as purely an image in its own right or if I thought it captured the music on the album particularly well, which seemed like fairly obvious indicators.
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