by Billy Johnson Jr

For Yahoo! Music

The cover of Janet Jackson's new album, 20 Years Old, due out September 26, will be designed by a fan. On July 18, Janet launched a contest giving fans an opportunity to create the artwork for her ninth studio set.

The Design Me contest requires participants to download images of Janet, create proposed album covers, and to post the creations on the contest page. Contestants will vote for their favorite submissions, and Janet will select her top four favorites, which will be used for the first one million copies of the album.

Janet and her beau Jermaine Dupri, President Virgin Records Urban Music, came up with the idea for the promotion. "We were going on the website and looking at all this creative stuff the kids were doing, and it amazed us," Janet says. "They were taking old pictures and they were just very creative with all the designs. We said, 'Let's have these kids design our album cover.'"

Janet hand-picked dozens of images, new and old, to be used in the contest. "They told me that I should pick maybe 20, 30 photos, but I think I went a little crazy," Janet says. "I picked way more than that. I gave them some of the new stuff I just shot for the album cover shoot. So they have some really recent photos as well as some stuff from 20 years ago."

Janet does not give participants any parameters for their designs. She wants them to be uninhibited and to "go for it."

"That's what it's really about," Janet says, "for them to manipulate it and get creative, and go wherever their images takes them."

To enter the contest, contestants should visit: http://designme.janetjackson.com.
To see a video of Janet explaining the contest click here.

20 Years Old celebrates the 20th anniversary of the release of Janet's 1986 breakthrough set, Control, that includes hit singles, the title track, "Nasty," and "What Have You Done For Me Lately." "I wanted to do something that paid homage to the Control album," Janet says. "And I thought of different titles like Out Of Control, but I settled on 20 Years Old because it's the anniversary of the Control album."

The album is co-executive produced by Janet, Dupri, and longtime collaborators Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, with whom she first began working with for the Control album. They wanted to make the recording reminiscent of their first studio sessions, but they did not record in the studio they used more than two decades ago. "Are you kidding?" Janet jokes. "In order to do that we'd have to go back to Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis to the first studio they had, the little hole in the wall, where we recorded the Control album. What we did do, we brought back some of the keyboards that were used on 'Nasty,' 'Control,' and 'What Have You Done For Me Lately' and used some of the same sounds. So that was nice."

"Call On Me," a duet with Nelly, is the album's first single. Both Janet and Dupri thought it was a good idea to work with the St. Louis rapper. "Jermaine wanted him as a guest on the album, and he's the first name I mentioned to Jermaine," Janet says. "He's just a great guy, a great talent, and I love that he's so focused. I love listening to his part of the song."