RSSApple and major labels try to bring back liner notes
By Tim Conneally | Published July 27, 2009, 10:15 AM
In the vinyl age, the packaging of a record album was integral to the overall experience that album gave the listener. A good cover could help sell more albums, and detailed liner notes could serve as an enhancement to listening. As packaging shrunk with changing formats, most of the impact of the album packaging was lost. Meanwhile, album purchases have been on a steady decline for years as digital consumers favor single songs over whole albums.
Apple and the "big four" major record labels are hoping to change that by re-inventing the packaging of the MP3 album. In a project reportedly codenamed "Cocktail," Apple, Sony, Universal, Warner, and EMI are working on packaging interactive content with digital albums. Albums packaged with song lyrics, production and liner notes, video clips and photos could be the next new type of bundle in iTunes.
Users will be able to enjoy the interactive components while listening to the music, in very much the same way listeners would use the packaging of record albums to enhance the listening experience of that format. The record companies hope that the added value will spark interest in the album as the preferred format again.
According to Neilsen SoundScan, , digital downloads constituted 32% of all music purchases last year, and over 1 billion individual tracks were sold. Only 428 million albums were sold during the year, a decline of 14%.
"Cocktail" is expected to launch in September, and there is currently no word on the effect it could have on album prices.
uggh crappy apple's up to no good again
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|Not enough. Anything that can be scanned or ripped will just end up on the internet. How about an iron on decal, wall poster or a t-s*** instead? My most vivid memory of high school was being sent home for wearing my Uriah Heep Abominog tee. I'm still ticked about it too.
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|Think of this pitch this way:
Steve Jobs: "Book and Music industry. You are getting commoditized because you have no differentiated platform for extending/re-inventing your product for the online age. We just so happen to have a set of tools that have proven compelling to the tune of 1.5B downloads, field-tested across 65K apps and with a current footprint of 46M devices."
Music/Book Industry: "There is no way we can re-create that value proposition, and we already see the writing on the wall with Amazon. If they are successful, they will be telling us how much money we can make or worse, go direct to writers and musicians, and design us out of the equation. How do we get started?"
This is the consummate 1+1=3 for a segment that is otherwise facing a 1+1=
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|What's new. iTunes already has the booklet for some albums. The book is a PDF file.
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|The article didn't mention this (you can find it in the original Financial Times article that this one links to), but the difference is that it would be interactive--e.g., you can see the song title in the artwork, click on it, and it will play in iTunes. Current iTunes album artwork in PDF format doesn't do this.
Additionally, the FT article plays on rumors of a potential Mac/iPod tablet device and notes that the combination of artwork (especiall interactive artwork) and such a device could be interesting. (That's probably a strech, but it's interesting nonetheless.)
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|lol will the notes be DRM protected? that would be funny... keep eyes peeled
yes and i'm aware iTunes is DRM free, minus TV/Movies etc, its still a valid question, that said Notes? ain't sparking nothin lol, those who are downloading albums via iTunes aren't likely to go buy a physical disc... are they smoking something?
hmm, click, buy, download.... or drive somewhere, waste fuel, take kids with you, look for available album, dammit its not there, f*ck, drive home in disappointment, try again? nah buy on iTunes/Pirate
hope theres a download without notes option for those that use iTunes :)
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|Pff, I buy music off zunior.com (great place for independent Canadian music) and they always include a PDF version of the booklet. For FREE.
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|No doubt record companies will use this as an excuse to charge more for the albums and therefore completely miss the point of prodiving an "added value" to the consumer.
The record companies are hopeless.
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|And I would venture a bet that these companies will want to charge for these extra goodies! Like the idea of offering extras, but if they are going to use this as another excuse to nickel & dime the customer, they can keep it.
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|Well I think that's a brilliant idea. How many people do I know that hates digital-downloads because of that.
Bring back the artwork!!! Hehe ;)
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