Religious beliefs in a number of Middle Eastern countries require women to be covered
Designers ‘re-imagine’ a lot of album art to respect local culture and traditions
Saudi Arabia and its neighboring Middle Eastern countries are notorious for censoring ‘sexual’ album covers by female artists in order to make the artwork more appropriate for a conservative audience.
Record companies hoping to sell their artists’s albums are ever-more sensitive to the beliefs and cultural traditions of each market they’re selling to, and will often tailor album covers in order to avoid offence.
In some extreme cases there have been reports of the Saudi government paying religious police members of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) to manually alter from covers.
Many labels now offer two cover options, particularly for their most popular performers, ensuring that the artwork will require no further doctoring and can be sold without causing offence.
There have been some memorable redesigns in recent years with Kylie Minogue wearing a wrap to cover up her white swimsuit, on the cover of her 2001 record Fever, Madonna swapping her revealing dominatrix outfit in favor of a one-piece leather body suit for her 2008 album Hard Candy, and Katy Perry being consumed by clouds on 2010 hit Teenage Dream, all in the name of Middle Eastern decency.
Almost all of Mariah Carey’s albums have been adjusted for audiences in Asia while Christina Aguilera has also been targeted by the censors.
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