Oddities of The Modern Age...

I’m working on the cover art for the upcoming Micronaut album today, and it got me thinking about how incredibly strange this business has become in the last three years. I mean, here I am, making a 300dpi front image for an album that will never exist on this temporal plane in a manufactured form. I was waiting for a render to complete in 3DS Max, and I was like “why the hell am I doing this at print resolution instead of screen resolution?”

I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense to do it at print rez, in case I, like, go on tour and, like, wanna sell CDs or something wacky like that. Then at least I have it and don’t have to do it over. But it just gave me a fit of the giggles. Why do albums even have cover art any more, when there’s no cover? The image is simply a picture you get with your iTunes download that you can look at and say “hey, this is the image that goes with these songs.” It is definitely an odd situation.

I am reminded of the River Run Project from Underworld, where each “song” (which was actually a single MP3 of four to five songs interleaved) came with a folder jam-packed with images. I’m still to this day not clear as to what the images were for, exactly, but they were kind of cool.

But I digress. My hypothetical question for the day is thus: how does one deal with the traditional accompaniments to an album, cover art and liner notes, in this day and age? My solution for Callisto is to put the liner notes on the appropriate page in the Positron store, and the “cover art” will be available in the store, and will come down with your iTunes purchase should you go that route. But this isn’t the only way, or remotely the best way. Thoughts?