It’s a cover up
August 15, 2007
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Packaging gets a make-over
What?: Just how important is cover art to the music industry now that downloads are image-free? Some say that the end is nigh:
* Hard-Fi are claiming the demise of the record sleeve. Their ‘interesting’ attempt sees the cover of their new album adorned with the message ‘No Cover Art’. “We had the Sleeve of the Year in 2005 and we looked at every way of trying to top it. But perhaps the best way is to kill off the sleeve altogether, ” said the band.
* Vote for your favourite in the BowieNet Ziggy Stardust 35th Anniversary Cover Contest. That’s if you can find a favourite amongst this collection of pre-school PhotoShop disasters.
* Beck, Razorlight and Ryan Adams are among seven musicians who have designed personalised covers for the front of their favourite novels. Publisher Penguin has undertaken the campaign in order to promote its line in blank-covered books, hoping the musicians will inspire others to do the same.
So What?: Classic sleeve designer Peter Saville referred to the Hard-Fi concept as the “White Album for the digital culture”. He may have been misheard over the word “white” though. The campaign is both lazy and weakly-conceived, but it does raise
some issues. Just where does cover art stand in the image-less culture of digital downloads? Can it still be effective when reduced to fit on an iPod screen?
Art itself died online with the onset of Google image search. The perception that images are free came long before the public perception that music was free (although you still won’t see a Google MP3 search).
Penguin, however, realises that people do actually judge a book by its cover. The impact of a cover as a bespoke from of artist expression has a unique sense of tangibility. Beck tried a similar campaign with his create-your-own-cover sleeve. Unfortunately he fell foul of chart rules, which make this unlikely to happen again in the near future.
Cover art should expand its remit in a digital environment, not reign it in. As for the end being nigh, let’s see who disappears first, cover art or Hard-Fi.
For further comment on the Hard-Fi campaign see this month’s Creativity Issue of Five Eight www.fiveeight.net
I’d argue that music is dead if Hard-Fi are anything to judge it by.