Sqwink Album Art Blog

This is going to be one of my shorter posts—well, more of a rant really. Every time I look on the front page of iTunes lately, I see a photo-shot of Adele, and now, her new album artwork for 19.

I’m not a fan of her music, but I reckon the Home Town single is quite good—however, this is about the sleeve (below).

I don’t have a problem at all with this cover, it’s just so boring and typical of British sleeves of the present. It is important for an upcoming star like Adele to have her face out there I suppose, but what I get annoyed with is the ‘if the face fits’ syndrome—where only the aesthetically pleasing photos make it onto CD artwork. There’s a lot of this going on in the music scene, just like it also has.

What’s my point you may ask? This album sleeve is just yet another (and uninspiring) example of how human aesthetics has been used to promote music. What if Adele was a faceless-trout-looking-ogre, but just as talented; you wouldn’t see a spotty, cold-sore covered face on the artwork would you? Well, not at least in this pop-culture.

As is, this very commonly-themed album art (albeit professionally-executed) is purposeful, yet unoriginal—and it’s like 19 Album Covers I’ve seen this week…there!

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.

I few months ago, I wrote a post about how Brit-band Hard-Fi were opposed to Album Artwork on their new release. If this wasn’t enough, I recently heard that at least one band is now doing a similar thing (I can’t seem to find out how, if you have any information, please leave a comment). If this carries on - and bands and artists, for some strange reason, stopped having album artwork, the future of iTunes could be in jeopardy!

Imagine the iTunes Store of the future, where Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, is annoyed at albums being sold with no cover art. Instead of having white squares dotted all over the store…he inserts his own image to boost sales. Click here for a full-sized and expanded view of this image.

So, what’s the moral of the story? We need CD artwork to represent the music, pure and simple. So this is my little blog protest to put it as humorously as I can…