'There's a certain relief with not having to own music. It's a lot of work'

[kirksnosehair]

I don't have a problem with streaming, but the people that are saying album artwork is not part of the art itself is.... ridiculous.

It varies from case to case, but for the most part I'd say that it isn't.  There are a few artists who have the liberty and intentions to go out of their way to influence the art, but that's not terribly common.   I'd consider "part of the art itself" to be something that the musician I'm paying for is at least indirectly responsible for, which is not often the case.

Just curious, but how can you possibly know this? 

[Kotowboy]

No offense, but that is patently absurd.

It isn't, though.

I'm sorry, but comparing my appreciation for album artwork to "lovingly studying the boxes your home appliances came in because they have a pretty picture of the appliance on them" is fucking ridiculous.  That's pretty much an unmitigated fact.

+1 sometimes o've bought albums on the strength of the artwork alone.

Sometimes if a CD has a really shitty insert i'll not bother buying it coz I want to feel like i'm paying money for the whole package not just the music on a disc and a 12cm square piece of paper with the absolute bare minimum information on it.

[theseoafs]

No offense, but that is patently absurd.

It isn't, though.

I'm sorry, but comparing my appreciation for album artwork to "lovingly studying the boxes your home appliances came in because they have a pretty picture of the appliance on them" is fucking ridiculous.  That's pretty much an unmitigated fact.

Well, what's your support for that statement? You can't just say "that's pretty much an unmitigated fact" and expect everyone to concede that you're right.

The analogy is adequate. An appliance's box has an informative picture and some specs on it so you know just what it is that you're buying. A jewel case has an informative picture and some specs on it so you know just what it is that you're buying.

[Fluffy Lothario]

I don't have a problem with streaming, but the people that are saying album artwork is not part of the art itself is.... ridiculous.

Why? Say there was a surviving audio clip of Da Vinci reciting a poem he wrote about the Mona Lisa. Would it be the same piece of art as the painting itself? What if it was played over loudspeakers in the room of the painting, or put on a plaque next to it? I don't think so.

Or how about this: say there's a casing Da Vinci intended the Mona Lisa to be kept in, and he painted something on it. Is THAT the same piece of art? Because that's getting closer to the album/album art relationship, and that would be absurd.

(I'm just using Da Vinci and the Mona Lisa as an example because I'm wildly unimaginative and can't be bothered thinking of another artist).

[ytserush]

Wow! This thread took a turn.


Here's the nugget from the article Nick posted:


"Rather than using our morality and principles to guide us through technological change, there are those asking us to change our morality and principles to fit the technological change–if a machine can do something, it ought to be done. Although it is the premise of every “machines gone wild” story since Jules Verne or Fritz Lang, this is exactly backwards."



I'm forwarding said article to some friends and relatives of mine.

[TL]

In this thread;
Some people are unable to differentiate between a work of art and a blender.

[kirksnosehair]

In this thread;
Some people are unable to differentiate between a work of art and a blender.

Exactly why I'm not even going to respond to any of that nonsense anymore, it's a waste of time.

[theseoafs]

In this thread;
Some people are unable to differentiate between a work of art and a blender.

Exactly why I'm not even going to respond to any of that nonsense anymore, it's a waste of time.

That's pretty cool. The next time I want to be right without proving my point, I'll just refuse to discuss. thx

[ZeppelinDT]

An appliance's box has an informative picture and some specs on it so you know just what it is that you're buying.  A jewel case has an informative picture and some specs on it so you know just what it is that you're buying.

That's a ridiculous analogy.  The vast majority of album covers don't describe the music.  The only part of the album cover that really has anything to do with describing what's inside is the name of the band and the track list.  But nobody here is arguing that those are the parts that constitute the art.  Maybe one exception is when that album cover is just a picture of the band, but again, I don't think that's really the type of album cover we're talking about.

[theseoafs]

An appliance's box has an informative picture and some specs on it so you know just what it is that you're buying.  A jewel case has an informative picture and some specs on it so you know just what it is that you're buying.

album covers

We should be reminded that what's being discussed is not just the album cover, but all of the packaging, including the back cover and booklet. So yes, CD's are generally put in jewel cases with an informative picture (i.e. one that communicates the mood of the music) and some informative specs (track names and lengths).

the type of album cover we're talking about.

This is another important thing to touch on. We should be reminded that a very substantial number of album covers just have a picture of the band on them. It's not just crappy pop bands that do this; The Beatles and The Who all had a lot of albums with smiling British guys on the cover.

[theseoafs]

Oh, and sorry for the double post, but in response to this:

In this thread;
Some people are unable to differentiate between a work of art and a blender.

I know exactly the difference between a work of art and a blender. However, I don't know why that makes the packaging a work of art comes in inherently more valuable than the packaging a blender comes in.

[ZeppelinDT]

We may be talking about the entire package, but the cover art is what really distinguishes CDs from appliance boxes.  An appliance box ONLY serves to describe the product inside.  A CD package may also describe the product inside, but it has additional elements that simply don't exist in appliance packages. 

Since you mentioned the Beatles, I'll use them for an analogy.  Look at the White Album.  Imagine you went into Wal-Mart and were looking through the toasters, and you saw a box that said "CuisinArt" and then the rest of it was entirely blank.  You'd be pretty confused.  And no toaster company would ever do anything like that, because even the concept of that is completely ridiculous.

But when a band does it on an album cover, nobody thinks twice.  It's perfectly acceptable.  And the reason that it's acceptable is obvious - because the purpose of an album cover is different than the purpose of an appliance box.

And maybe the Beatles did just take pictures of themselves for the album cover, but I don't know that that's really the norm anymore.  And I think this kind of helps my point rather than counters it.  In the 50's and early 60's, album cover WERE more similar to appliance boxes.  They were thought of as simple identifiers, which is probably why early covers are so simple and just show a picture of the band.  The Beatles were probably one of the first bands to start changing this, and turning their covers into more than just practical descriptions.  If you look at the Beatles album covers as they progressed over their career, they started off as fairly straightforward pictures of the band members, but then started to become more and more artistic.  Revolver was probably the first to really break that mold, and then they took it further and further with Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour and the White Album.

[theseoafs]

For the most part, a stellar post. The first adequate response to the appliance problem, anyway. However:

I don't know that that's really the norm anymore

This is off-base, though that's just because it's not the norm in the kind of music we as a forum listen to. Check out the top-selling albums of 2011: https://www.billboard.com/charts-year-end/the-billboard-200?year=2011#/charts-year-end/the-billboard-200?year=2011&begin=1&order=position

Of the first 20 albums, these are the ones which feature a picture of the artist in some stylized way:

1. Adele - 21
2. Taylor Swift - Speak Now
3. Lady Gaga - Born this Way
4. Jason Aldean - My Kinda Party
5. Susan Boyle - The Gift
7. Nicki Minaj - Pink Friday
8. Mumford and Sons - Sigh No More
9. Rihanna - Loud
10. Katy Perry - Teenage Dream
12. Bruno Mars - Doo-wops and Hooligans
13. Eminem - Recovery
15. Jackie Evancho - O Holy Night (EP)
16. Kid Rock - Born Free
17. Rascall Flatts - Nothing Like This
18. Justin Bieber - My World 2.0
19. Lady Antebellum - Need You Now

So the whole "album covers used to be boring but are now art" argument doesn't really work all that well.

[contest_sanity]

In Spotify I can listen while looking at the album's cover art.  Even better, I can use the lyrics plug-in and have them scroll for me on the screen as I'm listening to the songs.  That's pretty boss.

[ZeppelinDT]

Fair point.  To be honest, I was basing that comment on my own personal music collection, and the vast majority of those top 20 artists are not even on my radar.  I guess you have to look at it as a sort of sliding scale, where the cover art will have varying degrees of "artisticness".  This is probably a vast overgeneralization, but I would bet it's probably fair to say that modern music aimed more towards the "mainstream" is less likely to have "artistic" cover art than music that isn't.  When I look through my own collection, "art" covers outweigh "band photo" covers by a significant margin.

It actually might also have something to do with the digitalization of music.  I'd be curious to see how much influence this has on an artists or labels decisions about cover art.  Is the prevailing attitude now more like "well, most people are just gonna buy this on iTunes rather than buying a CD, so why bother with elaborate cover art?"

[TVC 15]

It would be sad to think that people would abandon buying and listening to CDs in whole-sale.  The last few purchases I made at the record store were CD box sets.  I simply enjoy the packaging and content that these items have to offer.  You end up reading the liner notes, looking at the photos, and be overall impressed with the assembly of the whole thing.

Metal has also been somehow leading the way in making the transition from just putting out music to creating elaborate box sets for the fans.  Mastodon recently came up with a good one for The Hunter, for instance.  My box set of Watain's live CD/DVD combo was filled with pages of photos and previous tour date listings that fans would love to consume.

I think the direction of CDs and vinyl will now hinge on digital for the casual listener and perhaps a limited run of CD and/or DVD box sets that may include so many extras like USB sticks, or t-shirts, or plastic sculptures...pretty much merch items that would lend a bit of collectability for the die hard fans.

[kirksnosehair]

I'd be curious to see how much influence this has on an artists or labels decisions about cover art.  Is the prevailing attitude now more like "well, most people are just gonna buy this on iTunes rather than buying a CD, so why bother with elaborate cover art?"

There is a tendency to scale back on artwork for albums among many of my peers (others who are signed to small, independent labels like we are) but it's not because we think people are "just gonna buy this on iTunes" it's because most of us know that the majority of people who obtain our album will do so via some torrent site.  So the thinking is more along the lines of "why bother investing in a great package that hardly anyone is going to lay down the money for?"

I paid a professional artist a good sum of money to create this album cover:


And he also created our 18-page full-color booklet.  Anyone who has the album knows that a lot of thought went into the artwork.  That's why the comparisons to boxes that your toaster comes in are absolutely ridiculous.  The artist, Martin Kornick, is pretty well-known in the industry and has done some work for Transatlantic, Keith Emerson, Spock's Beard, Neal Morse, The Tangent, Shadow Circus and others.  Unfortunately, the trend is not good. 

When I was kid we bought albums and appreciated the album art as part of the experience of listening to and experiencing an album.  We (The ANABASIS) sought to create a similar experience with our debut album and we'll do the same thing with our next one, which is in production now, but the fact that no one buys CDs any more makes it pretty hard to justify the expense of paying a professional to create an artistic statement to package an album with, and I believe that is a pretty major contributing factor to why more and more album covers DO look pretty boring and mundane.  There's no point in sinking a ton of money into something that most people are not going to pay much attention to.

[TL]

It has been said numerous times;
The argument here isn't that you should own an album so that you can look at the cover. The cover art was one of many things mentioned in passing, and people kind of went off on a bizarre tangent, focusing WAY too much on that specific element.

The point was the sentimentality related to owning a specific copy of the album. A specific copy that holds value to the owner for emotional, non-tangible reasons.
For example, my copy of Octavarium is the first DT album I ever bought, and they're now my favorite band. For me, that copy holds significance because of that, among many other reasons. If I lost it, I could easily buy another copy, or just stream it online, but I would be a bit bummed out because that copy, partially because of the music and partially because of other elements, holds sentimental value for me.
My girlfriend bought me a Stevie Wonder album once. If she'd just recommended the songs on it, and I'd streamed them, it just would have been some good songs that I'd probably but not definitely have remembered, and possibly listened to later. Instead, it's an album with sentimental value.

If someone just flat out doesn't hold sentimental value in things, that's weird, but I can't argue that. That is what I was talking about though, not whether or not album covers are all art unto themselves.

[Kotowboy]

Despite everything : Going to the shop on the day of release, picking the CD off the shelf, taking it to the checkout to pay for it and taking it home, unwrapping it - playing it whilst looking at all the art ( etc ) will *always* be better than :

Sitting at your desk and pressing " download all " or whatever.

[Fluffy Lothario]

The point was the sentimentality related to owning a specific copy of the album. A specific copy that holds value to the owner for emotional, non-tangible reasons.
For example, my copy of Octavarium is the first DT album I ever bought, and they're now my favorite band. For me, that copy holds significance because of that, among many other reasons. If I lost it, I could easily buy another copy, or just stream it online, but I would be a bit bummed out because that copy, partially because of the music and partially because of other elements, holds sentimental value for me.
My girlfriend bought me a Stevie Wonder album once. If she'd just recommended the songs on it, and I'd streamed them, it just would have been some good songs that I'd probably but not definitely have remembered, and possibly listened to later. Instead, it's an album with sentimental value.

See now I can understand that to an extent. For example, valuing a signed copy of an album, I get. But then the value is in the signature, not the physical casing.

Like I said, I can't say that the physical copy of any album I own holds higher value for me than the price I paid for it, and my appreciation of the music it contains relative to other music. My first album/s, my first albums by my favourite bands, hell, any albums by my favourite bands, or any bands I like? Beyond the price tag, I wouldn't be bothered if I lost the originals, I'd just go buy other copies (possibly; I have the albums backed up, I'd probably wouldn't bother). What would bother me is if I completely lost hold of the music itself in any form, and was incapable of listening to it other than via means which I don't have adequate control over or access to. Because I personally care about and treasure the music. Everything else to do with it is almost meaningless.

[Fluffy Lothario]

 

Since you mentioned the Beatles, I'll use them for an analogy.  Look at the White Album.  Imagine you went into Wal-Mart and were looking through the toasters, and you saw a box that said "CuisinArt" and then the rest of it was entirely blank.  You'd be pretty confused.  And no toaster company would ever do anything like that, because even the concept of that is completely ridiculous.

But when a band does it on an album cover, nobody thinks twice.  It's perfectly acceptable.  And the reason that it's acceptable is obvious - because the purpose of an album cover is different than the purpose of an appliance box.

Do you really think they would have done this if it wasn't obvious to people they were looking at an album from the shape of the vinyl and the words THE BEATLES somewhere on it (even if not on the front, on the side strip where everyone knows they can find it)? Records, tapes and CDs were, to my knowledge, always packaged in easily recognisable ways. Of course musical artists have more freedom to do something inventive with their packaging, and especially a band like the Beatles in 1968. There probably wasn't a single person in the Western world who didn't know when the Beatles picked their nose by that point, let alone released a new album.

I paid a professional artist a good sum of money to create this album cover:
And he also created our 18-page full-color booklet.  Anyone who has the album knows that a lot of thought went into the artwork.  That's why the comparisons to boxes that your toaster comes in are absolutely ridiculous. 

As far as I’m aware, no company would hire a complete amateur to create the packaging for their products if they actually wanted to sell them. Just because they’re not an artist doesn’t mean they’re not a professional designer.


To me, you guys are focussing on trivialities to create points to differentiate between music artwork and product packaging. It's like saying comparing Aphrodite's Child to British prog bands, or calling them prog fullstop, is ridiculous because they came from Greece.

Music existed for thousands of years before people put artwork on it (as any kind of normal practice). When did they start doing it? When it became a financial and physical reality that it could be reliably recorded, mass produced and sold as a consumer item to the common man. Why did it receive artwork? To make it more marketable and appealing to the consumer.

Why is a lot of album artwork far more artistic than the packaging of kettles and toasters? Because they're trying to sell art, not kettles or toasters. People are more likely to buy a toaster if it comes in a box which clearly shows and states what is being sold, and comes across as being professional. As the album as a means of selling music developed, record companies and musicians themselves realised consumers were more likely to buy music if the artwork itself suggested the band or musician had some kind of legitimate artistic talent or direction. It had to tell the consumer that yes, this band is a legitimate bunch of musicians, and you should be paying money for this music. That doesn't mean the artwork ceased to be packaging performing the basic function of selling the product.

[theseoafs]

Despite everything : Going to the shop on the day of release, picking the CD off the shelf, taking it to the checkout to pay for it and taking it home, unwrapping it - playing it whilst looking at all the art ( etc ) will *always* be better than :

Sitting at your desk and pressing " download all " or whatever.

This sounds suspiciously like an opinion to me.

[kirksnosehair]

Why is a lot of album artwork far more artistic than the packaging of kettles and toasters? Because they're trying to sell art, not kettles or toasters. People are more likely to buy a toaster if it comes in a box which clearly shows and states what is being sold, and comes across as being professional. As the album as a means of selling music developed, record companies and musicians themselves realised consumers were more likely to buy music if the artwork itself suggested the band or musician had some kind of legitimate artistic talent or direction. It had to tell the consumer that yes, this band is a legitimate bunch of musicians, and you should be paying money for this music. That doesn't mean the artwork ceased to be packaging performing the basic function of selling the product.

Right, I don't dispute that.  I DO, however, dispute this:

But generally speaking, attachment to an album's cover, booklet or case has always baffled me. To me, they're nothing more than the packaging. They're there to generate interest in the customer and sell the product, and to help the customer transport it home in good nick.Being so attached to them makes about as much sense as keeping and lovingly studying the boxes your home appliances came in because they have a pretty picture of the appliance on them and are a convenient way of looking up the specs.

The artwork is absolutely more than "the packaging"

And while it's easy to make comparisons, those comparisons do not always map to the correct context.

Artwork in the packaging of an album is NOT "just designed to sell the product" it is also designed to convey the essence of the audio art that is expressed in the music.

This consideration simply does not exist in the packaging of an appliance.  So the comparison is absurd at best. 

[TAC]

Despite everything : Going to the shop on the day of release, picking the CD off the shelf, taking it to the checkout to pay for it and taking it home, unwrapping it - playing it whilst looking at all the art ( etc ) will *always* be better than :

Sitting at your desk and pressing " download all " or whatever.

This sounds suspiciously like an opinion to me.

Obviously an opinion, but it's an experience that's very closely knit to buying a new album.

[Kotowboy]

Despite everything : Going to the shop on the day of release, picking the CD off the shelf, taking it to the checkout to pay for it and taking it home, unwrapping it - playing it whilst looking at all the art ( etc ) will *always* be better than :

Sitting at your desk and pressing " download all " or whatever.

This sounds suspiciously like an opinion to me.

Yes.


The correct one.

[Ben_Jamin]

A lot goes into album ART, especially if your using a painted piece. An example is Ayreon, he has this guy do the paintings which are pretty good size paintings.

Streaming is good, but will never replace a physical product. As long as you take care of it, it can last.a long time. That is one reason I see people downloading off iTunes, and using streaming services. Less stuff to take care of.