Creating compelling album cover art requires talent, though when I look through my old CD collection (how quaint!) it's pretty clear that talent is not a prerequisite for everyone who creates album covers. For a fun comparison, check out how surprisingly well My Album Generator creates passable album covers.

The formula is simple: choose to use either a random Wikipedia article or a simple adjective + noun for the name of your band, and a recent random photo from either Flickr or Photobucket. Currently album titles are pulled from quotationspage.com. Lastly, choose whether you want to create a "Metal" band album cover, the only effect of which appears to be adding umlauts over vowels randomly.

It takes only a few seconds to try, and you'll probably end up with a few good ones rather quickly. Here are a couple of my favorites: Spectral Mandible, Peoria Panorama, Puffy Jello, and Buddy Liles.