Music business needs to be more image conscious

Cleaning out the loft I came across an armful of vinyl LPs; had they been CDs, of course, they’d have only been a handful. Their size and weight were striking; but one thing they had that CDs certainly don’t is a canvas for artwork.

I don’t know if there’s a pub where former artists for record sleeves meet up, but if there is, the atmosphere is surely gloomy. Whatever happened to those big “gatefold” sleeves on double albums, where you had two feet of space to go mad? What about the photo booklet inserts that The Who used on Quadrophenia, telling a story to accompany the double album through dozens of wordless 11- by 11-inch black-and-white photos?

We’ve lost that with CDs, and even more so with the shift towards digital downloads. In the latter case, “album art” is barely there any more; it’s reduced to a 60K JPeg that doesn’t tolerate being upsized far. You don’t even get the depth of reading that a CD’s sleeve insert can offer – although to be fair, some of the albums sold on iTunes come with PDFs of the liner notes.

But that’s hardly embracing the digital age, is it? Album art (or even “singles art”) can and should be so much more; it’s only a question of thinking about and exploiting the medium, a discipline in which the recording industry has at last begun to show some capability (excuse me while I join the thousands watching the Sandi Thom webcast).