Lauren Alaina "Wildflower" Cover Art

UMG Nashville just released the cover art for Lauren Alaina's upcoming album, "Wildflower", and it was nothing like I had expected. She looks lovely, but she looks so sad and serious. It does not seem to portray the Lauren Alaina from the American Idol show, or from the tour (in any video she is always smiling and cheerful.) Scotty McCreery's cover art for "Clear As Day" is not perfect either (it is difficult to read the name of the album!), but at least he still looks like the same boy on the show, and the photograph is quite flattering.

It is not like they do not have good pictures of Lauren either. Her official site has a much better picture of her than the selected cover art and I had thought something more like that would be on her album:

If they wanted a more serious look they could have picked something that looked more like something out of her music video for "Like My Mother Does" which visually looks very professional and a lot more vibrant and colorful:

UMG even has some good shots of her on their own site! I like this one myself:

Of all the great shots that are available of Lauren, I find it hard to believe that is the one they picked for her album.

I know this posting did not have any numbers or graphs, so how about some pre-order numbers for the albums? Right now at walmart.com, "Clear As Day" is ranked #2 on pre-orders and "Wildflower" is #7, both priced at $10.88 there. On Amazon.com "Clear As Day" is #39 for all music and #7 for country at a price of $13.18. "Wildflower" is #199 for all music and #33 in country at $14.34. Amazon sure has some weird pricing on albums! Why does "Wildflower" cost $1.16 more than "Clear As Day" there? At CDUniverse.com they are both $12.74, and at DeepDiscount.com, they are both $14.18 (some "deep" discount!) BestBuy.com wants $14.99 for "Clear As Day" and they do not even have "Wildflower" listed yet. Best Buy even charges $9.99 for the 5 song EP's that sell for $5.00 at Wal-Mart. Who would buy their music from them?