The golden age of the album cover is pretty much over.

There has been a revival in vinyl sales the last few years driven largely by nostalgia. But, in overall terms, the era of vinyl - the era of the album cover - has gone

Simon Warner, Leeds University

Good read about the supposed ‘death’ of album art on the BBC (“Pop art in the era of the pixel”). I don’t think I buy the cries of ‘death’, although the art sits in the balance and faces a slightly rocky short-term future.

Designing an album cover has always been an exercise in embracing constraint, but at least in the vinyl days was a good sized canvas in its own right. The proliferation of the CD hurt by making things smaller, and we lost some intricacy. Even then, not unbearably so. A different constraint, and the new opportunity afforded by a changing the format into a multi-page cover booklet.

The switch to digital does some interesting things. Whilst album art remains square, the projection is now variable. It remains to be seen what the ‘true’ resolution of digital covers will turn out to be, and even when it does, where will the bias sit between intricate detail and iPod-friendly iconography?

Further, the success and ubiquity of the television-tied media centre is still in the balance. I quite like my Mac Mini media centre, (though it’s bi-wired into both the television and hi-fi separates, so I play music headlessly most of the time). Will such a set-up become a commodity, common consumer item? I ask, because on my 46” television, you could project album art larger than an LP ever was. Far from shrinking the canvas, you could make it bigger.

I wonder if the media centre offers more survival hope for the defunct ‘booklet’ concept too. The PDF booklets downloaded with iTunes purchases are a waste. Maybe customers avoid feeling like they miss out on something from the physical release, but really there’s no point. (They are impressively high resolution, though.)

If media centres are useful, though, the future of the booklet, or ‘accompaniment art’ as it often is, is not in a square paged supplement to the cover art, but instead in 16:9 aspect, HD resolution images. If a provider of music and media players were to turn around and announce a new feature whereby each song on an album could have an additional piece of art attached to it, to be displayed full screen when the song played, artists would get a new medium to play with, complete with new natural constraints.

I think that would be interesting. But would anyone care to implement it? Also would a record industry that no-longer has to pay for booklet art really want to embrace an expensive replacement? If both those come true, how many releases would really embrace the medium to accompany their music.

I’m a lover of tactile accompaniment to music. And digitalisation is going to take that away, for sure. Maybe the artists will find a way to extend the listening experience in other ways though, to fill the gap and find something new to play with. Via: BBC.