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Originally Posted by terminal pharmacy
You are right, however I do feel an extra connection of holding something in my hands like the cover with full artwork etc while i listen to the music. As for the teething issues, you have been able to buy/download music from the internet for a while and it seems people obviously aren't asking these companies to give them full audio quality otherwise they would have by now, there is a complacency that i see in the generations younger than myself about the quality of the goods they consume and this isn't just in the quality of the music they download. Peoples home internet connections these days have the bandwidth to download a full album at full audio quality in less than 15 minutes. I guess though I am showing my age and are kinda the last of the generations of people that like scouring all the record stores for that special find.
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Don't get me wrong, the things you mention are very much things that I believe in too. I just don't think they're absolutes. I think the traditional album format has proven to be a great way of communicating, but it's a fairly unique one really. Take album covers. In many ways certain covers have become as iconic as the records inside: The Velvets and Nico, Dark Side of the Moon, Sgt Peppers, etc. etc. But nobody thinks of for-example
novels in this sense. There's no 'standard' cover to something like 'The Naked Lunch', or 'On the Road'. Nobody notices because people haven't become used to seeing it. Maybe associative covers will continue with music, but if they don't I'm sure that eventually people will stop noticing their absence just as they do with novels, or DVDs (where there also isn't a 'standard' cover design.)
I find it depressing to think of the first Velvets album without the Banana on the cover, but i wonder if my two year old neice (assuming she actually listens to it one day) will. We're in that difficult age bracket where we still remember how things used to be done and hate to think that those methods might someday pass. My point I suppose is that once all the wrinkles are ironed out with the whole digital thing, there'll still be great artists that emerge out of it, i just doubt that they'll be expressing themselves through albums, will kick-ass sleeves.