For anyone who cares about music, this is hardly a heart-warming prospect. In the meantime, as they dither and prevaricate, their domain is encircled by Apple, Starbucks, Amazon, WalMart and various corporate entities with the wherewithal to offer digital downloads to an eager public. These lumbering conglomerates are doing what they have always done: waiting for someone else to show them the way forward. There used to be five major record labels when Sony and BMG merged this became four, and now it is hotly predicted that another merger will reduce the number to three. It's not worth discussing what the major labels are up to: they haven't got a clue. And what distinguishes so many of them is a deep-rooted commitment to selling physically packaged music with resonant cover art. This resistance movement is found mainly amongst independent labels micro labels often run by a single individual, and often existing on budgets that would embarrass a shoestring. Instead, I've discovered a grim-faced resistance movement amongst dozens of tiny record labels determined to hang onto physical packaging and expressive cover art, no matter what. Well, I might be missing something, but I've found nothing in the digital arena that offers a viable alternative to a well-designed CD or vinyl album cover. As downloading threatens to become the main distribution method for recorded music, it is widely believed that the album cover will be replaced by some new online format perhaps animated that will make CD packaging redundant. Besides hunting down examples of stimulating music graphics, I've also been looking for digital alternatives to the traditional album cover. Over the past few months I've been researching a book about current record cover art. Black to Comm "Levitation/Astoria." 7" Lathe-Cut Picture Disc, design by Marc Richter and Renate Nikolaus.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |