COVER ART RETURNS?

"Remember the days when you bought a record not only because you wanted to hear the music but also because you wanted to own the packaging?"

One of the greatest losses in music with the shift to CDs has been the death of sleeve art. Some of the greatest albums of all time had great covers that made them incredibly memorable. Even some poorer albums had such great cover art they are classics. King Crimson's In The Court of the Crimson King is an amazing classic with a huge bizarre cover that went over the back and folded open. Inside was a book with lyrics, poetry, pictures of the band and more and it was big enough you could actually read it and see details.


But the art was just the beginning of record jackets. Dark Side of the Moon came with a poster, Sticky Fingers actually had a working zipper, Physical Graffiti had a sliding insert that revealed what was behind the windows on the cover, and so on. There was more than just 14" of art, they actually were working artifacts which you could interact with. The White Album (technically named The Beatles) had a poster and full size glossies of each of the hairy Beatles to put on your wall.

With the advent of the CD, all this was reduced, if not lost. You can't package a poster in with a CD case. You can't put 8x10 glossies in there. The zipper was soon gone from Sticky Fingers, but it is impossible on modern CDs. Sure, there's been some clever work lately such as Metallica's latest Death Magnetic, but the art of album covers has been reduced to 5" square and the result is a corresponding diminishment of opportunity.

Well, courtesy American Digest, I learn this:

Apple, creator of the iPod and the iTunes store – the sworn enemies of commercially-packaged music – is getting into bed with the four largest record labels, to help them stimulate album sales. They're working with EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music Group on something called "Project Cocktail" that will produce all manner of extras to go with albums: interactive booklets, sleeve notes, photographs, lyric sheets, even video clips. Buyers will be able to call up album tracks through the interactive booklet, while leafing through pictures of the band and trying to make sense of the lyrics.

Does this remind you of anything? Of course it does – it describes the experience, among slightly older rock 'n' roll fans, of Owning An LP Record. The people at Apple, to their credit, recognise this as a calculated piece of applied nostalgia. "It's all about recreating the heyday of the album," said one (unnamed) Apple executive, "when you could sit around with your friends looking at the artwork while you listened to the music."

That's from an article at The Independent which goes into detail about why album covers and the interesting goodies tucked into them mattered so much.

Why did this stuff go away in the first place? Because its cheaper to put out standardized, simple CD covers than special editions with fancy gimmicks and inserts. The White Album was guaranteed a bazillion sales, so they didn't mind all the extras (and the Beatles had their own label by that point anyway). You can't fit that stuff in a CD still, but what you can do is put it all online for very little cost and that's just what they have in mind.

Whether that will help an ailing music industry or not remains to be seen - certainly having Sargeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with the cardboard moustache and standup of the band is more meaningful than a few images and bits online, but the internet offers media that a record could not: videos for instance.

I miss the old cover art, but this is at least a step toward something better.