Visit Hard Format – reaching for the sublime in music design.

Michaela Stone wrote:

My project concerns the topic of digital music downloads and the subsequent potential for development and innovation in the design of music packaging. In terms of collating “successful” CD packaging examples, your blog has been such a help. So I write to ask if you would be at all interested in answering the following ten questions. This would help my research.

So here are my answers:

I’m going to answer this promptly otherwise it’ll take me forever to do so. Justin’s been taking a back seat on HF for some months now, so it’ll just be me responding.

Interesting subject, but I would say that… I hope the following responses are of interest/use.

Interview

1 Can you share any initial insights into the topic of music graphics for digital music downloads?

It’s probably terribly out of date, but you might read my 2004 piece ‘Interfacing with music in the digital age’ on my music reviews site, Somnambule. Given that computers and mobiles devices have more than enough power to deliver amazing visual experiences to accompany music, development in this area has to date been disappointingly limited. This is the quick answer: http://www.hardformat.org/snow-patrol-a-hundred-million-suns. Unfortunately it’s platform-specific. A platform-agnostic solution would of course be preferable. Given Apple’s current dominance of the digital marketplace, one might look to them hopefully. iTunes’ interface, however, has tended towards file management over anything else, though Coverflow and the latest Grid view options have been welcome.

I’d also refer you to Adrian Shaughnessy’s ‘Cover Art By: New Music Graphics’ in which he interviews a number of contemporary designers and asks them about digital graphics, but the summary is that no-one comes up with anything very much.

2 What has been your experience with digital music packaging thus far?

See above. I’m still waiting on art labels like Raster Noton, ECM, Ghost Box and the like to deliver something creatively interesting. One area you should explore if you’re not already are the likes of RjDj and Bloom for the iPhone – these are clearly new directions for interaction and (limited, but artistically fascinating) creative music-making. My experience of music artists’ websites has been not great, but Beck has done some fun things and there’s probably others.

3 What do you see as the future of music packaging? Will there be a revolution, or a slow process of change?

It’s hard to find record stores on high streets nowadays (and I live in London). Change is happening quickly. My domestic music playback system consists of multiple laptops playing through Airport Express into a stereo amplifier and speakers. I use the laptops to play CDs (I don’t have a CD player in the living room), but I do have a decent turntable which I received last Christmas – I buy vinyl off eBay and play it regularly. It’s the Japanese tea ceremony applied to music playback of course. My listening’s captured to last.fm (which I check too frequently) and I’m currently listening to Pole and Jan Garbarek on Spotify. I share musical recommendations via last.fm, ftp and dropbox shares. Since Spotify my use of soulseek for scoping has reduced significantly. I scan multiple RSS feeds in Google Reader for music news. I’m not certain I had an iPod five years ago, but that may be my hazy memory. Many of the aforementioned media have appeared or matured in roughly that time. Conclusion: change happens fairly rapidly.

4 What would you consider problematic in terms of designing within a smaller space (e.g. album covers that are viewed on iPods)?

Covers look beautiful on the iPod screen – they’re smaller, but they shine in the darkness! iTunes has since something like version 4 allowed multiple graphics to be pasted into its mp3 file artwork tab – that’s not been exploited yet, but I really hope it will be one day – the single screen is frustrating in terms of visual design, but I’m not the average consumer. You should check Kraftwerk’s yet to be released career retrospective The Catalogue: http://www.kraftwerk.com/ > click Info > click Der Katalog. They’ve clearly retro-designed their back-catalogue to function at smaller scale by emphasis the iconic aspect (which was already there admittedly). Note how recognisable they are in those small thumbnails. Then again if you refer to that post of mine again, graphics need to look good at a screen size larger than CD covers…

5 What potential positives do you think digital music packaging has?

Books are nice things, but I’ve now read four or five novels and a couple of volumes of short stories on my iPhone. I don’t buy paper books any more (well, except for photography books). The point is it’s all about convenience. That’s why digital wins – the vast majority of us are satisfied with lower quality sound and image because of that. I know I am (though I listen to mp3s while on the move via mp3s encoded at 192kb/s on £110 Ultimate Ears Super-fi 5EB headphones). I also happily play records which are the antithesis of mobile convenience. My unreliable conclusion – the medium is more fragmented than ever which allows us consumers to pick and choose and develop solutions that satisfy them.

6 Do you see CDs as becoming redundant? What do you think of this notion?

Probably, but with a niche market surviving. That’s what’s happened to audio and video cassettes. Vinyl sold with digital downloads may prove to be a stronger niche. Labels like Rune Grammofon and Southern Lord are seeing impressive sales there I believe.

7 Who (agencies, designers, record companies) do you think are being the most innovative in the field of music packaging?

You’re not referring to digital are you? Physical design-wise, I hope we’re covering them on HF:

Kim Hiorthoy/Rune Grammofon
Julian House/Ghost Box
Olaf Bender/Raster Noton
Susan Archie/Dust-to-Digital+Revenant+Table of the Elements

In the mainstream it’s Mark Farrow and Trevor Jackson.

See: http://www.hardformat.org/the-designers

8 What role does the designer play in determining the future of music packaging?

I’m not a designer, but my guess would be very little. Look at interviews with Peter Saville in this regard.

9 What role does the consumer play in determining the future of music packaging?

Surely they’re voting with their feet by choosing digital. We’re on our way back to the pre-Alex Steinweiss period, but there’s a slim chance that someone will realise the value in aggregating music metadata and design into more concentrated form as record and CD sleeves used to do/still do. We do have more information available to us now than before, it’s just that it’s dispersed over the web and takes Google to find.

10 How do you feel about the idea of music packaging as a non-physical thing?

I’d welcome it – there’s clearly massive potential (RjDj, Bloom), but also danger of platform deprecation a la Brian Eno’s generative music system Koan.

And of course, any last thoughts or suggestions for possible areas of research [within my research] are more than welcome.

See above, particularly the interactive/visual aspects of iPhone development. Also, that any definitive conclusion would be misguided. Music is in a state of massive upheaval. Hope that’s of help.

Two questions for you: how would you feel about my publishing this interview in HF’s news section and two, sending me a copy of your dissertation when it’s finished?

Good luck with it!

(Pic from first page of Google images results on query of ‘idea for a blog‘)

I wrote this beginning to a post many moons ago and it’s sat around in my drafts folder ever since. Given the increasing number of entries devoted to the design of CD covers and other music media, it seems increasingly pertinent:

Blog devoted to interesting music design e.g. rare box sets, beautiful/unusual packaging/promotional material along the lines of Adrian Shaughnessy’s three books e.g. Kraftwerk’s Minimum Maximum box, the three Various 7″ singles, the 7×7″ See Mi Yah, etc. Anybody could submit and if their suggestion was published, they’d be credited. Or there could be a weekly or bi-weekly posting. Good quality photography would be important. Some text, but not long screeds. It could act tangentially as a plea against the loss of design to the virtual domain and maybe even encourage good work.

The middle of last December saw me celebrating two years of being subscribed to Last.FM. To tell the truth, the celebration was only really marked by my taking the above screenshot and promptly forgetting about it. Anyway, here I am now remarking on said event. At that point I’d listened to 42,345 tracks, Kraftwerk was my weekly top artist and my overall top artists were Kraftwerk, Ornette Coleman and Rhythm & Sound. Nothing much has changed since. When I signed up it was rather unattractively called Audio Scrobbler, the service was much less reliable and there was little of the social aspect the site now sports. Mog.com may be snapping at its heels (I’m not a fan of its busy interface), but Last.fm claims 15 million users which should ensure fairly accurate recommendations and neighbour matching.

It seems to be a growing trend for bloggers to publish regular posts of their recent del.icio.us links. Blogs which regularly publish link-only posts include Micro Persuasion, City of Sound and 43 Folders. I find this to be a minor, but unwelcome development. I already subscribe to far too many feeds and I suspect I’m not in a minority of RSS users in this regard. If I’m going to bother to subscribe to something, I’ll do so because I think that the feed has something interesting to say and isn’t going to won’t waste my time. I’m not interested in ‘more, more, more’, I’m interested in overview or detail, focus and insight. Aggregate postings of 10+ links represent a dilution of the essence of what I’m looking for in a good feed. Having to scan such posts is tiresome. If I see 5 new posts in my newsreader and then discover 2 or 3 of them consist of lists of links, I’m inclined not to wade through them, but instead to unsubscribe from that feed.

Here are my suggestions for improved service:

• Best – authors inclined to post links should provide a separate feed for links to give readers the choice. After all, it’s possible to do this already just by visiting an author’s del.icio.us page and subscribing to any tags a reader is interested in
• Alternative – post groups of links on a key subject as here and here
• Fallback – If you don’t want to do this, ask your readers for feedback – maybe I’m the only one annoyed by this trend!

Does anybody else share my distaste for MySpace? I know it’s big in the teen segment, but an increasing number of bands and labels seem to think it’s necessary/useful to develop a MySpace page e.g. Matthew Bourne, The Leaf Label, Wibutee and John Fahey (okay, the latter was set up by a fan, but somehow still it seems like sacrilege). I can recognise that it provides easy to use tools such as music player, blog, etc., but I just can’t summon up any enthusiasm for the endeavour. Homepages invariably play music as soon as they’ve loaded – interfering with whatever music I’m currently listening to; homepages are infinitely long because they contain an endless list of hello messages, 99.9% of which are utterly banal; there’s banner advertising (thankfully excised by a combination of Adblock and Noscript Firefox add-ons); there’s the endless befriending requests; there’s the dull page design. MySpace? No thank you.

Until I can find the time to fix the **()&)!@!@ commenting, please email any responses to this or future posts to me: enquiries + the a with a circle round it + eleventhvolume + full stop + com. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks.

I really appreciate comments on my posts, so please don’t hesitate if you’re tempted to respond to something I write. To everyone who has posted – thanks! Unfortunately I’m increasingly being blitzed by comment spam and have received 150+ comments for moderation in the last 24 hours. Flicking through these has become a real chore so I’ve had to enable the option that requires peeps to register before commenting. I guess this is just to ask you to not be put off and to continue (or begin) responding to my posts. Unless you’re a spawn of the devil spammer that is! Thanks for reading. Okay, I’ve finally managed to enable a spam plugin that was giving me problems, so I’m going to hold off the comment registering and see how successful it is.

Whilst writing, I’m pretty much in two minds about having migrated this blog to WordPress from Blogger. I was attracted by the ability to provide a proper search and to be able to categorise my posts. The fact that it’s free is also attractive. However downsides include:

• The whole thing is too complex for my little brain. For example, trying to adapt the visual template is much too complex, hence the dull generic look that’s prevailed for so long here. In fact, most of the adaptations available seem to be only for those with a fair amount of time and energy to work out the not at all clear instructions.
• And the aforementioned comment spam is a real downer. WordPress offers all sorts of ways to battle against this latter problem, but the one thing it doesn’t offer is a the word verification offered by Blogger that would surely alleviate this.

All in all, I believe I’d return to Blogger if it wasn’t a gigantic pain to manually reimport all my posts since I made the switch.

[fig.2]

Well it’s interesting to me… Further to a previous post expressing frustration at the single track, rather than album-centric nature of Last.FM’s lists; I was looking at the ‘top lists (local)’ pop-up window [fig.1] accessed from the menu bar if the icon’s enabled, and noticed for the first time a little button at the bottom. Clicking it revealed a new window [fig.2] that actually displays total time spent listening to individual artists. If it’s reflected here, does that mean Last.FM’s capturing this information and could create charts based upon the key criteria of time spent listening rather than number of tracks heard. No sign, sadly, of albums being captured, but I guess that would represent a more complex challenge of marrying tracks heard to album track listings, etc. This is, in a small way, promising, but then perhaps it’s always been there, I’ve never noticed it and Last.FM don’t intend to do anything about it. Who knows. Here’s that profile page in full. Correction: I’ve just looked at the bottom of that page and there’s a listing of the top albums which nicely points up the absurdity of the current way of compiling the charts – I listened to John Fahey’s Hitomi (21 tracks) for a total of 2:41:04, but it’s third to Robert Johnson’s The Complete Collection (29 tracks) with a total of 1:16:13 – less than half the amount of time spent listening. Okay, there’s counter arguments to my preferred approach e.g. it could be argued that I’ve elected to listen to Robert Johnson 29 times rather than 21 times, etc, etc. Er, I think I’m going on about this for much too long, so I’m going to stop now…

Lovely piece of web design for the remastered reissue of the ahem seminal album (etc), even better it’s married to excellent content and technologies. I’m still in two minds about the change in the design. The ‘stretch’ of the original is attractive, but it’s hardly groundbreaking, in fact the technique verged become something of a cliche fairly recently. The original is so spooked and visionary that it’s a shame to lose it (having said that, I know Peter Saville did the original layout, typography, etc, but that always struck me as fairly uninspired.) I understand that the updated design relates also to the Creative Commons licence under which the website is published and the offering up of multi-track MP3s for public remixing and/or incorporation into other projects, but this too doesn’t exactly strike me as groundbreaking when compared to hiphop’s long history of uncondoned appropration.

Ultimately, the change in cover seems almost sacrilegious, and although you could argue that that’s just a convention – book covers change all the time after all – I’d hate to see such a remix culture arise in the music-related visual sphere. In fact, I mourn the loss of any number of great book cover designs, often superceded by far more banal efforts. I’m thinking of Irene Von Treskow’s designs for Paul Auster:

Andrzej Klimowski for Milan Kundera:

and Jeff Fisher’s illustrations for Jose Saramago:

I’m really just filing this here for future reference. I’ve been experiencing major problems with my net connections more – lord, lord – more than a month now. Here’s my checklist for attempting to sort the problem out:

• Check with ISP that the net connection is sound
• Move the router from close to a shared wall
• Reboot using the reset button in the back of the unit (15 secs at least)
• Connect via ethernet cable to the router and checking settings in the Netgear control panel
• Change the wireless channel in the control panel
• Upgrade and downgrade the router firmware (available via the NetGear website)
• We have a USB modem and are able to connect successfuly using that with the same leads as the NetGear (though – deeply irritatingly – connection to this modem causes sudden, random kernel panics)
• We have two laptops – both of them are experiencing the same fluctuations and complete dropouts in wireless receptivity. Even when reception is good, the router is unable to connect to the internet.

I’ve narrowed it down to two possibilites now:

• Router failure
• Interference from a neighbour’s network (visible in the airport menu) – can’t check with him as he’s away for long periods

I’ll finally ascertain which one of these it is when I manage to borrow a friend’s router and see whether that works or not. Of course the router is outside its guarantee period…