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The Failed Experiment of the Digital Album Booklet (theoutline.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Before the ubiquity of MP3s and streaming platforms, one of the many small joys of buying a new album on CD was slipping the booklet out of the jewel case and reading the liner notes, credits, and lyrics while the music played for the first time. These days, the biographical information, album production notes, promotional photos, and printed lyrics that fans once relied on physical literature for have found homes in other areas online. Artist websites, social media accounts, and sites like Genius and WhoSampled offer a patchwork of album information, like credits and clues to what happened behind the scenes. But those details rarely exist in one place, and production and songwriting credits seem less and less important. Meanwhile, the form that was intended to replace the traditional booklet, the digital booklet, remains a rarity when it comes to new releases. The idea of digital album booklets may appeal to only the nerdiest of music fans, for whom having everything in one place is a ritualistic way to listen to music and for whom album credits are crucial. But in an age where branding is often as important as skill, the lack of digital booklets feels like a wasted opportunity for artists wanting to communicate directly to fans without a social network as a middleman.
Agree completely. Not everyone cared, but for your favorite albums or favorite band or even an unusual track you might want to know something more about -- the CD booklet, preceded by the LP jacket (sometimes with accompanying booklet) was often really informative. (Oh, and those tiny print things on cassettes too... I don't miss those.)
Like DVD extras that gave fans insight beyond the movie, "liner notes" are going the way of the Dodo. I have a friend who has been trying to write on recently released music, and the basic info you'd often get in liner notes is often hard to come by, if they exist at all.
I want the full-size posters that used to come folded up in many LPs.
When I was in high school, half the wall space in by bedroom was covered with those things.
It's already May, dude... FLAC or bust. Lossily compressed audio is so last quarter.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
I guess it's just the latest progression of nostalgia to experience recording formats that had inherent limitations. Perhaps it's some way of suffering for one's art? I've lived through albums, cassettes, cds and now am thrilled that I'm quite literally living in the future. I recall saving up allowance/job money to be able to spend $20 on a CD, then finding out only two tracks were worth it. Nowadays we spend $15/month to feed the music desires of my whole family, and I can download whatever I want to listen to on a whim. If there's one good track on an album I throw it in a "favorites" playlist and throw the rest of the record out. There's so much back catalog available that I quite literally don't have time to listen to crap music because there's so much out there I just couldn't afford as a kid.
I don't know what planet you are living on, but music is more diverse and accessible than it has ever been. In the 80s you basically had two choices for recorded music - hang out at the record store with a few thousand titles hand-selected by the record store's buyer, or hang out at the independent record store with a few hundred titles hand-selected by the owner. That was it. Now you can select from millions of signed and unsigned artists from all over the world, and the cost of recording has come down so much that you can get better quality than what the Beetles had to work with for virtually free. If you are bored of today's music, you have no one to blame but yourself.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
These booklets do satisfy music nerds. But for the most part, I think they were included as a way to try to justify the high price of CDs. After all, you were getting a lot more than just audio for 10 songs! Now that music has been decoupled from the CD medium, and people buy music a-la-carte, the motivation for spending the time and money to create the booklets (or some digital equivalent) is no longer there.
This. If a digital booklet had a high-res cover, I'm in. Every time I buy a new CD, I rip it (the physical disc is my backup). And then I scour the Internet trying to find something better than a blurry 400x400 image scanned from paper with halftone artifacts and edge fade all over the place. Sometimes I get lucky and find a high-res digital version from the label, but usually not. Scanning it myself doesn't actually improve the situation, due to the halftoning problem and being lazy.
And it's not like I want a ridiculously high resolution. I scale these all down to 500x500 and compress it reasonably since it's embedded in each track.
MP3 has no patent encumbrances or licensing fees....
Good-bye