Dragging Album Art Into The Digital Age
Eliot Van Buskirk over at Wired's Listening Post brought up a topic this morning that's been on my mind since the "Enhanced CD" days in the late 90s. That is: Why hasn't the music industry upgraded their ideas on album art?
Let's face it- the physical CD and liner note sleeves are little more than a waste of plastic and paper at this point. Besides just being conscientious of our home planet, dragging album art into the digital age could bring the music loving consumer a whole lot more content for the price of their download.
Hit the jump for more on this topic.
With record cover designers already manipulating their work to look good in thumbnails on iTunes and Amazon storefronts, isn't it high time we reformed the visual stimulations that accompany today's tunes?
The greatest concept I've seen in a long while for album art, that both preserved the tradition of the cover and enhanced the experience for the listener, was the iTunes version of Death Cab For Cutie's Plans. For around $12.99, about $3.00 more than the standard iTunes download, I got all the Death Cabby goodness with a bonus track, two free QuickTime videos about the making of the album, and most importantly- a .pdf "Digital Booklet" with all the beautiful art and lyric sheets. While I was listening, I could simply click (rather than flick) through the .pdf and take in the sweet visuals.
Would this cost millions less a year for labels to produce? Certainly. Would this give music fans more reason to buy downloads? Definitely. We've had the technology to make this happen for almost a decade, and yet the major labels are screamingly change-averse to it.
Here's a solution: Continue to print the gloriously archaic 12" by 12" LP Covers on vinyl versions of the albums for real diehards, can the wasteful CDs that people are just buying to rip to their computers, and give the online masses some value-added tidbits. Anyone with me?
What say you?!