Dream sleeves: How a 40-year-old idea could save the music industry

I found this write up very interesting, but the writer seems to omit the most important element of why people bought vinyl then, and now. As we all know it is about the sound quality, but hte article makes some great points about the status of owning a certain copy of a record.

By Rob Sharp

Digital downloads and free streaming have changed the music industry for ever. Now record labels have hatched a plan to revive the album format with 1960s-influenced, art-laden packaging. John Walsh thinks the idea rocks.

Remember the days when you bought a record not only because you wanted to hear the music but also because you wanted to own the packaging? Those days may be coming back.

The music market is in dire trouble. Album sales here (UK) and in the USA were down by 14 per cent last year, while digital downloads, perversely, went up. No matter how much record companies discount brand-new CDs, they remain on the shelves of HMV; potential buyers prefer to select a few tracks of a new album and download them from iTunes, rather than shell out on the whole work. Young listeners, the companies claim, have lost the acquisitive impulse that makes you want to own a record album, or build up a collection of the things in your wobbling CD tower.

So how does the industry plan to persuade music fans to buy albums again? By changing the packaging to echo the design of albums from 35-40 years ago.

Apple, creator of the iPod and the iTunes store – the sworn enemies of commercially-packaged music – is getting into bed with the four largest record labels, to help them stimulate album sales. They're working with EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music Group on something called "Project Cocktail" that will produce all manner of extras to go with albums: interactive booklets, sleeve notes, photographs, lyric sheets, even video clips. Buyers will be able to call up album tracks through the interactive booklet, while leafing through pictures of the band and trying to make sense of the lyrics.

Does this remind you of anything? Of course it does – it describes the experience, among slightly older rock 'n' roll fans, of Owning An LP Record. The people at Apple, to their credit, recognise this as a calculated piece of applied nostalgia. "It's all about recreating the heyday of the album," said one (unnamed) Apple executive, "when you could sit around with your friends looking at the artwork while you listened to the music."

Yes yes – but it was about so much more than that. To a generation that grew up and went to university in the 1960s and 1970s, the long-playing album was a thing of wonder: a thin but substantial 12in square package of cultural signifiers and quirky allusions, a window onto a world of psychedelic weirdness and fey romanticism, rock posturing and folkie dreaminess. It was, even more than the clothes you wore, the main signifier of your identity. The album you were currently digging, in 1967 or 1971 or 1976, said more about you than money, uniform or Ben Sherman shirt ever could.


Read the rest here:

www.independent.co.uk