Sqwink Album Art Blog

I’ve discovered recently that not everyone knows about the itunes free download. Yep, it costs nothing. The most useful music program, available for Mac and PC is available to download online at Apple!

I use it on a daily basis and would recommend it to anyone, seriously. For me, apart from [obviously] listening to my music, I like to keep track of new music album releases so I can review them here on my blog. We’re bearly onto version 8 of itunes at the moment, so it’s a program with most of the bugs sorted out. That’s it for this post, I just want you to know that it’s available for nothing (like 99% of you do)…

As a graphic designer for CD Sleeves, I’m very interested in the latest development in this apparently new ‘iTunes naming convention’ - Album Artwork. Obviously, as time progresses, and now in 2008, 80% of all albums are downloaded through online retailers, so are no longer physical ‘CDs’.

Back in the day, a collection of music was aptly named an LP - a Long Playing Album [enclosed in an album sleeve]…and as this format started to fade away for the most part, CDs became prevalent - and I assume, the phase ‘CD Sleeve’ was born.

Now, bare with me, I’m getting to the crux this whole blog post. When you import an album into iTunes, you can scroll down a menu and Get Album Artwork (see image below). Note that it is no longer referred to as a CD sleeve and other such derivatives.

So, the question I’m asking is this: is Apple iTune’s taking it upon themselves to call sleeve’s ‘Album Artwork’ in this mp3-toting day of age? I know that this phase has been used for decades too, but not the prevailing choice for describing LP/CD covers. If you have any genuine thoughts on this issue, feel free to leave a comment.