April 05, 2006
The Future of Album Art?
A new kind of digital liner notes for music albums is popping up at the iTunes music store. Created by TuneBooks, as of this writing there are only two releases available with their new interactive booklet format, The Darkness's One Way Ticket to Hell... and Back, and The Click Five's EP release, Catch Your Wave.
This is the newest step in the evolution of album cover design. The previous 'step', and still the most prevalent, is the so called "digital booklet", which is nothing more than a PDF file of the CD packaging design. I suppose it's nice to be able to print the insert and traycard on a home printer, cut them out and assemble your own jewel case – but it's hardly an evolutionary step. More like a step back in my opinion.
Tunebooks uses the Quicktime movie format (.mov), which has far more capabilities than most people are aware of: animated transitions, sprites, links, scrolling text, optical effects... they are all possible with the correct authoring environment. The Tunebook created for One Way Ticket to Hell... and Back uses all these features. Check out a rough movie screen capture here (4MB Quicktime mp4).
The Good
-Brings the popular things from print publishing design into a digital format (liner notes, lyrics, photos)
-Gives artists and labels direct link opportunities for band websites, additional content and merchandising (photos, posters, ringtones, t-shirts, PC games, etc)
-One click for tour information, band blogs, mailing lists and other communication with fans
-Richer media content (animations, video)
-Labels have opportunity to revive back catalog sales through videos and extras, similar to that of DVD bonus features
The Bad
-Non-tactile: no feel, no factory-fresh smell
-Less exciting than opening and checking out print packaging design
-Poor integration with iTunes, it appears too small
-Without iTunes, you must view with Quicktime player on a computer
-No iPod integration
-Will it still work in 20 years?
There's certainly no stopping the digital revolution in music and entertainment. Given the prevalence of software that finds and embeds album cover art in digital music files, there seems to be no danger of music album releases losing their visual art component. Only time will tell whether TuneBooks become a new standard, or just a blip on the ever-changing radar.
Comments
Nowadays everyone can have their own album cover. Isn't a scrapbook like one?
Posted by: matt at April 10, 2006 04:33 PM
I am actually researching this topic for a proposed essay on the future of cd cover art and what is in store for cover designers in the future...Does anyone knows of any good sites relevant to this topic because im having a hard time finding some theory on this even though it is such an important issue floating around today ..
Posted by: bianca at August 27, 2006 07:44 PM
