Apr 122007
Townsman MrClean passed along this great piece on the value and role of packaging music in the age of digital download. I highly recommend you check it out and report back here with your feelings. Nice work, MrClean!
Townsman MrClean passed along this great piece on the value and role of packaging music in the age of digital download. I highly recommend you check it out and report back here with your feelings. Nice work, MrClean!
Ahh! Loved this post – thanks townsman mr clean! The cover that sticks out for me is Ummagumma – I still think that’s a really neat cover. My mum had a hope chest filled with vinyl that we used to listen to records from when we were in grade school and that cover always made me look twice. That’s a time-consuming effort for that video too! I have an image up (nnneeeerrd) of some of my vinyl too – only my scanner isn’t big enough so I had to scan 3/4 and then 1/4 and piece them together for this image of some of my (random) stuff:
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f298/moderngal/afew.jpg
What I want to know is, how did this fucker get into my house?
ha ha:”D
I’ll blame Steve Jobs…or maybe Shawn Fanning and Napster way back when…
(Hope you weren’t referring to me!)
Digital converts, do you ever miss the packaging? I get laughed at for my love of packaging a few times a year, but I’m curious to know how many of you don’t make a value judgement regarding packaged music over unpackaged music. I think of the likes of us who’ve built little shrines to record collecting over the years. Is scrolling thorugh your iPod menu or hard drive folder as good?
I don’t miss the packaging as such, and I don’t really ooh and aah over special pouches and inserts. I’m not a very visual person, but I will admit that a cover image or even a color can be a memory trigger for placing an album or connecting a song to an album. I think Itunes can downlaod cover imagery, and I know WMP does, but it’s thumbnail sized.
What I miss is detailed credits. I’m a music geek, so I like knowing who played what instrument on what song, where the tracks were recorded, etc. That kind of information is available on the web only intermittently and usually not as completely. Same goes for lyrics.
I like having credits and such available although I’ll rarely check them out unless I have a specific question.
I’m a sucker for packaging. As often as not that’s why I’ll spring for box sets when there’s no need to have, for instance, Mosaic or Bear Family boxes. Those multiple takes are more than I need, but, oh, the packaging.
Packaging is why I’ll still buy the occasional Bob Dylan boot. All the material is out there to download for nothing but those bootleggers they make some mighty good stuff sometimes.
ugh – i miss good packaging all the time and my biggest beef is opening up a four-sided inner sleeve and finding it blank!! i still prefer records, tapes and cds to going fully digital, even though my hard-drive is nearly popped with songs, my solution of course being not to delete and copy to CDs, but to get more RAM! i’m definitely a visual touch and feel package kind of person and i love a) opening up a gatefold or sliding out some liner notes and b) being able to hold something in my hand and knowing that someone put some effort into the presentation, or completely botched it… dave from a canadian band called the inbreds runs his own digital label, where the bands just make sure their cover design is submitted in pdf format and any album you buy through his label you can also print out the full cd artwork to accompany it on your printer – http://www.zunior.com (the little digital music label) – and I just noticed they have a stuart mclean volume up there – he is amazing in a david sedaris kind of way – so good. his stuff is like canadian comedy mixed with stories like in this american life. slice of life funny.
this thread reminds me of the realization people started making in the early 90s that the smaller size of cds meant a radical change in cover art. sure, if you wanted, you COULD have a detailed image with lots of tiny elements, but it would have less room to breathe, and less chance to make an impact. so a cover like sgt. pepper’s, sure, it’s square-shaped, it FITS on a cd, but it needs the bigger surface to really work. the most effective cd covers are ones that use that smaller space economically…(e.g.., the cover of “dark side of the moon” translates very nicely to the cd size).
i think madonna’s “Like a prayer” was the first cd cover that i recognized as being made with an awareness of that…
even a small thumbnail is all you need:
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/8/8a/200px-Like_A_Prayer.jpg
very clever.
sally, your point about the downloadable / printable cover art is one that the moderator mocked the living shit out of me for making about a month ago. i was being all optimistic about the future of art work accompanying music, and pointing out the possibilities suggested by the kind of approach you’re describing above by zunior.com. why not take it further? imagine cover art that consumers could change around and interact with before printing. that would be cool.
but mr. mod would have none of it, made some snide remark about how cool all this new interactive cover art would look on the postage stamp sized screen of his iPod, and dismissed me, summarily.
(and i get crapped on for being grumpy around here…now he’s leaving these piddling little bird shit comments about jimi’s “rambling catalog”…i must demur)
all i’m sayin’ izz…thank you for bringing this up again. let’s see if you can get a better audience than i did…
Like, interact with and change around how? Like putting the front image on the back cover and changing up the track listing, or choosing from a few different covers in different designs – or maybe colours – like a warhol painting? As a collector of things, and say – obviously this may never happen – but say, in the future digital age that this is the only way that newly released music is available (perish the thought) and that there are different colour combinations or artwork to choose from, and as a collector – I have to have all five! I’m going to be mighty pissed to have paper versions of five different kinds of albums with different artwork, what if there’s going to be different mixes available – mono vs. stereo as well! (sally c runs screaming from the room)
Okay, I’m back. Tell me more about your idea Art. I obviously missed this before. I am keeping an open mind, yet, I am mostly rebelling against the future and holding on tight to my vinyl records…;)
I suppose I should weigh in on this since I found the link.
I’m a visual person and designer so the artwork and packaging is important to me. But I never collected LPs, just crappy cassettes instead. And now I have CD’s – about 600 or so (down from maybe 8-9 hundred at one point?). I also have a bunch of music on the computer that was downloaded online – mostly all legal and free tracks (yes there are some from the wild Napster days still around…)
I like details as BigSteve does, so bands that include detailed credits please me. I prefer CD booklets or sheets and don’t like those cardboard digipaks. Plus the Internet does allow for more details to be found online which I think is a good thing. If I get a disc from someone of a CD and it turns out that I like it, I will buy the CD to have the real deal (Sally sent me some Pavement and I’m planning on buying two discs). If I don’t like the music, I usually pass it onto someone else.
Shameless self promotion:
There is some free Narthex music you can download – artwork included for you to print out:
http://ookworld.com/narthex.html#download
Also check out the Hunger Artists:
http://ookworld.com/hungerartists.html
And some of Mike’s guitar music:
http://ookworld.com/steelstringflattopsedition.html
Really cool, Dean! I should also mention that I don’t necessarily have a problem with stuff being available digitally (like the zunior site, or the narthex listed above – i used to link to a page that was just mix cds and they made one a month with cool graphics), but I just don’t want everything to go digital, or rather I don’t mind it digital, but only up to a point – you know? And I’m not sure how “interactive” I’d dig a CD being… I get ticked off by some of my favourite CDs that I put in my computer when they open up a flash site first or try to install an active x interactive thingie. I just want to hear the tracks and not deal with the extras like band photos or lyrics and videos right away… I guess I have to be in the mood for browsing those extra files and know that it’s not gonna close down anything else I’m doing when I put it in.
Townsman Ismine wrote:
It’s good to know some of you are helping to remember my little cuts. I tend to slay so many of my loved ones, that I lose track of good ones like the one you recount:P
Honestly, I know the days of gatefold albums aren’t coming back, and I have little problem with the reduced quality of mp3s. I’m not a hi-fi guy, and for me, listening to mp3s on my computer at work or at home is akin to listening to pop hits on a transistor radio when I was a kid.
I have thousands of mp3s on my computers, and I have hundreds of CDs with mp3s burned onto them. The problem is, only a few of them have cases that I somehow connect to with my handwriting on the CD identifying the contents in a way that seems special to me. Like Dean, I will buy the “real thing” when I really like somethign I’ve downloaded or had passed onto me by a friend. However, I would like to have at least as much connection with my burned CDs as I used to with my cassette tapes that I made or were given. I can still recall the brand cassette I used to record favorite mix cassettes. I can still recall the little sticker that gave me fits as I tried to adhere it to the cassette itself. I can recall the joy of writing the songs and artists on the covers in some way that seemed special for that given mix. I don’t get that kick with burning a CD and, at best – in the rare cases I do so – generating an automatic track list. I might as well be cataloging my work.
I’d LOVE to find a way to make my burned downloads and downloads on my hard drive seem more personal and special, but it’s yet to come. Listening to tracks on blogs that have a little bit of style, background, personal spin, and graphics is as fun as anything. It feels like I’m doing more than opening a file cabinet and pulling out a manilla envelope. Once I’m done with that experience, though, such as following a download of a track I like on Little Hits, to name a blog I get a kick out of, the song’s not quite as good after some time. The thrill wears off too often. I’m not saying this is good or bad, just the way I feel, and I’m surprised that more people don’t feel this way. The All Music Guide-generated facts that appear in our digital listening devices, are the same thing as those little crawls on CNN, MSNBC, et al. They’re just creeping around trying to gauge my marketing opportunities. I want stuff to attempt to turn me on.
Come to think of it, why should music have art “associated with” it? The only reason it happened in the first place was that music was stored on flat, circular storage media that required a package. It made sense to decorate the rectangular cover. If a song is just a digital file, then somehow attaching a digital graphic with the song seems a bit contrived.
I’m with Steve on the art issue. Cover art developed because there was empty space, and it was only marketing sense to put pictures on there. Often pictures of cute girls that had little to do with what was inside (Jonah, I’m looking at you!) And it strikes me that a lot of the complaints about tech related music are about the lack of vision and annoying marketing opportunism gliches. But the first ones through the breach are always the capitalists. I think things like inter-format disconnects and pop-up style P.T. Barnum-ism are like crank-start cars. They will seem just that goofy once things get smoothed out. The impracticality of the creative view will make itself felt over time.
hey slocum, lighten up!
i kid, i kid.
great points everyone’s making about cover art here.
great big gatefold covers – an opportunity to associate images with music for packaging purposes – are a quirk of our mid to late 20th century capitalism, yes. but that doesnt mean that the association of music with imagery is completely arbitrary.
for me, listening to music has always been a visual experience, long before i ever became familiar with most of the covers in that youtube. and i’m sure i’m not alone in seeing things this way, because there have been a few traditions in place that draw associations between music and images. to name a couple: there’s a long tradition of synaeshtetes that predates the album era, and also a long tradition of writing dating back to antiquity that associates sound with image.
as for the future of art that is generated in support of music, i think it’s more ubiqitous than it ever was, though we don’t notice it, or don’t appreciate it. sure, we miss our 12″ LP covers, but in their place are a digital graphics “attached to songs” that are so seamless that we don’t even question whether or not they’re contrived.
videos are a form that seemed dead when mtv stopped playing them, but youtube has all but resurrected the video as legit…suddenly it’s imperative again for a band with a new album to have a video, and since money is tight, people are coming up with clever, but inexpensive ways to make them.
see the famed “conveyor belt video”,
or this one by my labelmates, wheat:
http://www.empyreanrecords.com/wheat.html#
or this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS5fkPFUskQ
there are also webistes where every page is inherently visual, but also include videos (conceptual and performance), photographs, and fan art (which, by the way, is further proof that many people hear music in visual terms).
sally, i don’t know specifically what would make downloadable cover art “interactive”, as i suggested above, and i blanch at the use of the term, too. like slocum, i tend to think of some of the annoying features you pointed out, like audio cds that automatically activate some “interactive feature” you didn’t bargain for, as parts of an awkward transition. as far as cover art is concerned, it seems like it would be really easy to have consumers who really want to burn a cd of the music they’re purchasing online to also have the option to choose colors or move things around, or at least have multiple options, like you were describing. it would depend on the artist.
time to go….
Okay, before I run off to work myself – I just wanted to let anyone know who’s interested that MOJO’s latest Collector’s Edition version of their mag is all about THE GREATEST ALBUM COVERS! It’s almost like they were reading our minds…! It’s really a cool read so far though, I highly suggest picking it up if you dig sleeve art! CD & vinyl are highlighted –
later, rock town heroes!