The Future of Album Art

This article on designing for shrinking album covers makes some interesting points that we've experienced first hand, specifically how a smaller medium is driving album art towards "simplicity, bold color, stark imagery, and unadorned type." But, I also think it neglects some clear opportunities uniquely available in the digital world.

When we released our first proper album in 1999, manufacturing and distributing music was not easy. Our gold master was digitally mastered from analog tapes, our album art was printed with 4-color press, and it all had to replicated in a big CD manufacturing facility. Making CDs this way was expensive. As I remember, the minimum order was 1000 CDs, which cost over $1000. And, distribution was limited to consignment in records shops or what we sold at shows. Getting online distribution via the now-defunct Aware Records store was a huge step.

By the time our next release came out in 2007, the world had changed for the better. Between Discmakers and CDBaby, it was now possible to take an album from digital master to iTunes for a few hundred dollars. However, when it came to choosing the album cover, I was still thinking about a CD people would hold in their hands -- and learned some lessons about what works best in the new world of shrinking album covers.

In order to make low-cost, short-run duplication possible, Discmakers prints digitally, compromising on quality. To get the album in online stores and iTunes, CDBaby then scans the artwork from Discmakers. Convenient, but also another step down in quality. So, what begins as crisp, intricate design gets a little lost in translation. Combined with shrinking size, a lot of subletly and texture disappears.

For our most recent release in 2008, designing for fans buying on iTunes and listening on iPods was top-of-mind. So, we went with a stark, black-and-white image with simple, bold text, which represented much better at smaller sizes. The only thing I failed to learn from the last release were lessons of punctuation and capitalization. iTunes chokes on symbols like the parentheses in (slight return), capitalizes the first word in a title (downcounting becomes Downcounting), and appends EP with a hyphen. So, if you want your album title displayed consistently -- you have to play by the rules.

Anyway, for all the drawbacks of shrinking album covers, the advantages of both making and consuming digital music are many. But, I think there are some unexplored advantages to digital album art. First, however, let me state that including an awkward pdf version of CD packaging is an exceedingly *bad* idea. Other than portability, it doesn't play to any of the strengths of digital media.

My short-list for digital packaging would look something like this:

• Meta-data. Lots, lots more: where the track was recorded, what instruments were used, what amplifiers, notes from the artist, engineer, producer, sidemen
• Interactive. For starters, don't use a pdf, so I can at least copy and paste. But, also let me tag, comment, or add reviews. What about listening to snippets of the original music any samples are drawn from?
  
• Searchable. Make the meta-data standard, indexed, and searchable. I would love to be able to search a database (whether online or sitting in iTunes) that would give me a list of songs in my library featuring Art Blakey on drums, produced by Dre, recorded at Electric Ladyland studios, or using the ProCo Rat pedal