Today many consumers still purchase CDs rather than digital music files and digital albums. Hundreds of millions of CDs are still bought every year. Unlike digital albums CDs offer content including liner notes, photos, extended album art and lyrics.
As music formats have changed, album artwork has suffered, lyric pages once found in a CD booklet are now nonexistent and liner notes are a thing of the past.
People want the music along with the artwork and the extras and they are not getting it.
‘Fans downloading full albums from BitTorrent sites almost universally choose files that include scans of the CD booklet over those that don’t. ‘
eWeek says it best – buy a digital album today and all you get are a list of tracks and (maybe) a thumbnail image of the album cover that you can’t even read.
According to Eweek, Apple plans to make nice with its label partners by offering a bit more with each download, such as lyrics and more interactive album art.
The truth is major music companies need to offer their own iPod plug-in that will import better album art, liner notes and lyrics directly from the label or artist and ported into iTunes and the iPod.
This is the year that companies need to bridge the gap between old-school CDs and the digital future.
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