Beyond Album Art
As I watched the video of Steve Jobs presenting the iPhone at MacWorld (this is a must watch video if you haven’t seen it), something occurred to me that has nothing to do with the iPhone per se. In fact, it would have surely occurred to me earlier if I used a fancy player like those from Apple, but I use plain old WinAmp, which doesn’t make your album art dance across the screen while you’re listening to music. My screen is busy anyway displaying pages of C++ code and the like.
Nonetheless, creative use of album art to decorate music players is bound to become the norm as more people listen to music on their phone or on their set-top box. But isn’t it ashame that we have the same image for every track on the album? This made sense when there was actually a physical album to slap the art onto. But if the purpose is to have something relevant and pretty to amuse the eyes while music is playing, why not a different image for each track?
Perhaps this sounds far-fetched, but so, once upon a time, did the idea of producing an ADD-inducing video for every track, preferably with scantily clad dancers playing volleyball on a Hawaiian beach while band members sip rum cocktails and try not to look embarrassed at how trite the whole exercise has become. Compared to the modern video, a single image can’t be that much effort. The biggest barrier may be that music player software, formats and transfer protocols aren’t ready to handle this. But the new paradigm for music consumption makes the advent of a major new creative discipline — track art — seem inevitable.
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Maybe eventually music players could build in a capability like Snapp Radio. It’s a mashup that selects Flickr images to display while you’re listening to Radio Paradise or last.fm, based on tags that seem relevant based on the song title, lyrics, artist, etc. It would give you a slide show throughout the whole song, not just one image. Definitely outside the scantily-clad-dancers mold.
Comment by Eve M. — 1/13/2007 @ 11:45 pm
Cool idea! If this starts to take off I could even imagine people tagging images with song names intentionally. Nonetheless, I still like the idea of having custom art designed specifically for a given track.
Comment by Matt — 1/14/2007 @ 3:34 pm
I’ve thought about the same thing-
Track art might be created around album themes: color, object themes, variations of an image, etc. But it seems like tracks are slowly diverging from being parts of albums as they are sold/downloaded more and more as single entities. Track art is another step in that direction. Sad…
But you’re right. Albums are release on the internet more and more- it won’t be long before one is released with a collection of track art.
Comment by Brian Pan — 1/15/2007 @ 10:20 pm