In the Digital Age, Is Album Cover Art Dead?

"Why do you keep doing this?" "Hey, if you love something, it's not really 'sticking with it.'"

Wang Kai runs a vinyl shop in Jiaodaokou, Beijing.

I first met him on January 26 this year, at a panel discussion titled "Do You Remember Who Bought You Your First Walkman?" On the panel were Hei Mai, a reporter for Sanlian Lifeweek; Demone, a DJ from Tangsuan Radio; Tong Zheng, a record collector; and Wang Kai, in a black-and-white wide-striped shirt, round glasses, and a pointed knit cap.

"I've always felt vinyl is the best way to listen to music, and the best way means taking the music seriously. There's a whole complicated process to it, a sense of ritual; one side runs just over twenty minutes. To put it bluntly, listening to music should cost money. Why do you pay for a movie ticket but expect music to be free?"

Somewhere in the conversation, someone pulled out Pink Floyd's 1973 classic The Wall. The album tells the story of a boy named Pink who loses his father in World War II, grows up under an overprotective mother, spends his life depressed, and finally descends into madness after drug abuse. The story is drawn from the real childhoods of two band members. The cover carries nothing but white bricks and blood-red lettering.

Riding the momentum, they brought up another Pink Floyd album on similar themes, The Dark Side of the Moon. It ranked sixth on Billboard's list of the 50 greatest album covers of all time.

The day of the panel fell exactly 2 years, 9 months, and 15 days after the death of Storm Thorgerson, the designer of that cover. Six people had signed up to hear this group talk about vinyl.

The Glory Days

A scene like that makes it hard to imagine that vinyl records and sleeve design once had a golden age, from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Cover art once stood for a secret rapport between musicians and their fans. "When I was 15, living in the northwest of England... album covers were like windows onto another world, crowded with images. When I saw Andy Warhol's hand-drawn art on the Velvet Underground's cover, everything felt different. It was art that belonged to a generation... real pop art," Rick Wakeman, keyboardist of the British band Yes, said in an interview.

Music critic Shantals Bellare wrote much the same thing in a retrospective piece: "Once, walking down the narrow aisles of a record store, you could take in art with no effort at all. It wasn't framed and hung on walls; it lay on the shelves. Those mouth-watering 12-inch cardboard sleeves did more than protect the record. They gave visual form to the complete listening experience the music inside would deliver. Holding one in your hands, the urge to pore over every detail, to pull the sleeve open and dig out the liner notes, was no different from the urge to drop a brand-new record onto the turntable."

Cover art could also decide a band's commercial fate. When the Sex Pistols released their debut album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols in 1977, the word "Bollocks" across the cover brought strict public censorship. The censorship didn't hold for long, because the cover, brimming with punk spirit, instantly became a hit, printed on T-shirts, posters, and merchandise. The fight over censorship even turned into ad copy: "The album will last. The sleeve may not." The Sex Pistols shot to fame overnight.

This small 12-inch square also carried a conversation between generations and between genres. Take the Beatles' eighth studio album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in 1967. On the cover, the Beatles stand in front of a crowd of cultural icons: Bob Dylan, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Edgar Allan Poe, Karl Marx, Lewis Carroll, Jayne Mansfield, Shirley Temple, and other British rock bands. (Despite the cover's towering place in history, designer Peter Blake was paid only 200 pounds for it. "It felt bitter," he said, "but I just had to move on.")

Or take London Calling, the 1979 album by the punk band the Clash, plainly an homage to Elvis Presley's self-titled album from 23 years earlier. Both used the same neon pink and green, but the central image shifted from Elvis's head-back, howling rock and roll to Clash frontman Joe Strummer smashing his guitar in full punk fury.

Trace this golden age back to its start, though, and you find that for a long time before vinyl, records were sold wrapped in plain paper.

In 1948, Alex Steinweiss, the 23-year-old art director at Columbia Records, was planning the packaging for The Voice of Sinatra, the latest album by jazz pioneer Frank Sinatra. His colleague at the label, Peter Goldmark, had just developed the 12-inch vinyl format that would become the industry standard.

They decided the format needed a proper push, so they printed artwork on the album sleeve and unveiled it at a grand launch event in New York.

The decision was not just right but historic. Sinatra's album sales shot up, and cover art became from then on the most important part of a musician's packaging, spreading later to other goods: T-shirts, posters, memorabilia. The golden age of cover art opened, at bottom, because covers moved records.

The Cover Was Always Part of Branding. It Is Just No Longer the Only Part

There is nothing wrong with chasing sales. Seen from a business standpoint, cover art has always evolved because of it. The cover was always part of branding; it used to be the core of a brand, and once more and better, faster, cheaper alternatives arrived, its standing fell.

"In those days [the '60s and '70s], the album cover mattered enormously to the person buying the record. There was no MTV then, no music videos, no YouTube plastered with faces, no other channel to help you get to know your favorite rock star... You'd buy an album, play it, and turn the cover and the liner notes over and over in your hands, hunting for some clue as to why these artists were so great," designer Aubrey Powell said.

In the digital age, new technology and new formats changed all of that. "What makes an album cover stand out is whether the campaign you design around it hangs together," Greg Burke, creative director at Atlantic Records, said in an interview. "Compared with a single image, this is more about the campaign and the personality of the whole brand. Color and theme are the two things you have to think about. If your cover uses a red wolf, that has to carry through into the music video, the costume design, and a lot more."

Against that backdrop, the album cover stopped being the core of promotion for many musicians and became a lever instead. Design began chasing interactivity and participation, chasing viral spread on social networks.

Take Taylor Swift's 2014 album 1989. The cover came out first, then the music video for the single "Shake It Off." On the cover she wears an '80s-style sweater and retro red lipstick, showing only the lower half of her face, the whole thing heavy with Polaroid nostalgia. The promotional photos that followed carried the same retro look: sunglasses, red lips. Twitter and Instagram took these visual elements apart, and people raced to imitate them and post their own.

Drake is another artist skilled at running a whole campaign off a cover. When his 2015 mixtape If You're Reading This It's Too Late came out, half the internet filled up with parodies and spoofs of the cover. The design suited promotion perfectly: it could be blown up into the most eye-catching poster on a billboard, shrunk into an icon on Spotify, or printed on a T-shirt to look cool. His new album this year, Views, flooded the internet the same way.

The cover is also no longer a required part of setting the tone for a release. Beyoncé, who loves a surprise more than anyone, introduced the idea of the "visual album" with her self-titled 2013 record, releasing video and audio at the same time, every song paired with a short film unpacking the musical thinking behind it.

For her second visual album, Lemonade, this April, she launched her activewear brand Ivy Park at the start of the month, setting off speculation about a new record. Then, on the day the album dropped, HBO aired a 60-minute concept film of the same name with a large cast of stars, built around the line "I was served lemons, but I made lemonade," telling a musical story that mirrored the turns of her own life.

Before the Digital Age Began, Business Had Already Made Cover Design More Popular

Beyond the changes technology brought, commercial logic was always at work behind the scenes. Even before the digital age, cover art had already passed through one major turn, driven by the music industry's pursuit of faster, better, cheaper.

British designer Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson, mentioned at the start, were both founders of the legendary studio Hipgnosis. The studio's run between 1967 and 1982 looks almost impossible to repeat now. "Those 15 years working together were like Andy Warhol's studio in New York. Everyone gave it everything."

Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, 10cc, Def Leppard, AC/DC, Scorpions, Paul McCartney & Wings, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, ELO, T. Rex, Yes, Black Sabbath — all of these legendary bands worked with the studio. "Every Christmas, a whole year's worth of covers could paper all four walls of the studio."

Artists loved Hipgnosis because before the '70s nearly every album cover was a portrait of the singer or the band. As the music turned more abstract and psychedelic, cover design had to change with it.

"Hipgnosis's abstract designs, built on surrealist photography, drew in a lot of bands," Powell said. "That was the most lucrative time for cover design... We did whatever we wanted. No band ever told us what to do or how to do it. We rarely put a band's photo on the cover either; we were more interested in the design itself and in what it meant."

A few years later, things changed. The Sex Pistols' debut, Never Mind the Bollocks, arrived.

"Jamie Reid, the designer of that album, tore up newspapers and glued the scraps onto pink cardboard. It cost $2. At the time a cover from our studio cost $50,000 to make. Suddenly the whole world changed, punk took over, and it felt like our days were numbered."

Jamie's hunch was right. By the end of the '80s Hipgnosis had dissolved fast. The abstract, psychedelic era, the era when designers called the shots, was over.

"Commercial artists and cover designers used to feel like architects, stonemasons, and plumbers," Jeff Kleinsmith, art director at the label Sub Pop, said, looking back on cover design in the Hipgnosis years. "The public and musicians alike felt there was a thick technical barrier between them and professional designers."

The cheap, high-impact design of punk bands like the Sex Pistols broke that barrier open. Popular design quickly became the mainstream, and technology pushed it further along: the cassette arrived and boomed in the '80s, then the CD in the '90s, then MP3s, streaming, and YouTube. Punk rock and do-it-yourself album production caught on too, and now anyone could have an opinion about cover design.

As the format shrank from a 12-inch vinyl record to a 4-inch CD to a music icon under 2 inches, designers found that even with a say in the matter, they had less and less room to work in.

Greg Burke, creative director at Atlantic Records, said: "When you have 12 square inches to spread your creativity across, the sky's the limit. If you only have 2 square inches, the only thing left in your head is how to grab attention."

Under those conditions, designers were usually left with two approaches. Either sharp colors and type with a blunt message — Burke's example is Cee Lo Green's single cover, black letters on yellow spelling out that line about somebody's mother — or the singer's face filling the entire frame, typically for a newcomer's debut, like FKA twigs's LP1.

Going Popular Doesn't Mean Dropping Your Own Convictions

When we put popular appeal and art in the same sentence — or set the rational logic of business and technology beside something as creative as cover art — the balance between the two deserves a closer look.

Wang Kai doesn't think album cover design has declined. "So many records nobody has heard of make people want to listen just because of the cover. Plenty of new covers have real design sense. I think people who feel cover design has declined are just attached to the beauty of the physical object."

He does feel that the customers walking into his shop are not the ones who used to. "Today's consumers can't buy their way back to the feel of that old market," he told the media. "My real customers are still that first wave, the ones who came over from buying tapes, just with the format swapped out. There are some new faces who come in, think the vinyl looks cool, and buy a couple for the cover. That's one type. Then there's the type I really want to turn into long-term customers: the ones who got a shot in the arm at my shop, bought a turntable, came back and bought records a couple more times, but might not come a third time. We run an online shop too. We have to, or there's no way to stay afloat. Online sales are already close to 60% of our total revenue."

For a shop owner, does a trend like this mean catering to popular taste? Judging by how finely Wang Kai sorts his labels and genres, he hasn't. "I just did what I liked. You have to take it seriously."

What about the musicians?

Ye Jingying, drummer for the veteran Chinese punk band Reflector, told QDaily: "The ones who compromise are usually the newer, younger bands. They want more people to accept them in as little time as possible, to listen to their songs, or to get onto bigger stages. Bands like us, who've been at this for almost twenty years, don't care at all. Because once you start caring, you lose even the little bit of character you have left. I guess it also has something to do with fate. We still have a solid group of fans, and we don't want to change. And if we do change, it's on our own terms."

Reflector has had plenty on its plate lately: writing and rehearsing, festival sets, commercial gigs, and a part in a TV drama, playing the members of the second male lead's band and his good friends.

On the subject of physical records, Ye Jingying slowed down and weighed his words. "We prefer the texture and the feel of something you can hold. This is a 'thing.' After all the hard work of rehearsing, writing, thinking, we want the music we made to be something you can pick up, something you can see."

He paused, then made the point again: "It's a 'thing,' not a pile of numbers. We want this record, this thing that records the recording. We don't want a digital file floating around in the sky. For us that would mean losing the whole point of making music... It's part of it, and an important part, for us."

"It's like how a lot of things can be replaced electronically now. Some instruments, some sounds can be swapped for digital versions. But don't you still need to go see it live, watch someone actually play the guitar, the bass, the piano, the drums, have the singer's spit land on your face, before you really feel it, right?"

Gao Yufeng, bassist for the band Brain Failure, says much the same: "We put out physical records. We usually make them ourselves and have Xingwaixing distribute them. We have people we work with regularly on design, posters included. The album cover matters a lot. It stands for the meaning we want to convey."

The cost of making, packaging, and promoting a physical album is usually handled entirely by the record label. According to Japanese figures posted by the Zhihu user Drwild, revenue from a record is split roughly like this: 54.6% to the label, 30% to the record store, 9% to the producer, 1.7% to the composer, 1.7% to the lyricist, 1.7% to the publisher, 0.4% to the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers, and 0.9% to the performer.

According to Dave Cool, a blogger for the American band-website platform bandzoogle.com, the split on a CD runs roughly 30% to the label, 30% to the record store, 2.2% to the producer, 4.5% to the composer and lyricist together, 5% to the manufacturer, and 6.6% to the performer.

We haven't been able to get figures for the Chinese industry, but judging by these two sets of numbers, a band's cut isn't large. Which means that if a label doesn't put in enough resources or effort, the quality of a record comes down to whether the band is willing to get involved, and able to.

"There's no ceiling to this. If you want a different level of quality, it comes down to two words: spend money. Of course the best case is a great idea at low cost. But in my own experience, the times something came out well without much money, it was because you had to do it all yourself: dig through mountains of material, go out and run it down in person. That's the only way."

Ye Jingying has seen what happens when a band just hands its work over to a label and a designer. "You have to understand every part of it yourself, or you won't even know how you died. There really are bands that never involve themselves in this. What they call handling it means sending someone to oversee it, and that person never actually does the work. So every cover comes out worse than the last, just hideously ugly. Nothing to be done. The band isn't happy with it either, but what's the use of complaining? You have to find a way to turn a situation that awkward around."

Boring Army, the 1999 album the band took part in, was one of the rare Chinese releases to come out on vinyl. "That was the only time we ever did vinyl. We knew a lot of foreign friends back then, and they were the type who'd pitch in and help us with all kinds of things. A few foreign exchange students raised some money, had it pressed abroad, and then gave it to us. A few hundred copies."

Release You, from 2010, has a small story behind its CD cover. The liner notes read: "At first the band wanted to use an acupuncture diagram as the cover, to show the full sense of 'release you' more clearly, but as something sold as a product, it couldn't be taken that far. The band went to the designer from the album's music-video crew and started over, dropping the original plan completely." The final result was a hand-drawn robot clutching a heart, seemingly a nod to Green Day's 2004 album American Idiot.

The "designer from the music-video crew" in the liner notes belonged to a German design team that had worked with Reflector on three albums, originally called Tree House. The same team shot Wang Feng's music videos for "Brave Heart" and "In the Spring." But Ye Jingying says Tree House has since broken up and moved into film, and even won a Golden Horse Award in Taiwan.

"These days, first we can't afford them, and second they don't have the time. They'll be gone for six months at a stretch, and it's incredibly hard to catch them in Beijing. Right now they're on Zhang Yimou's crew, shooting that Great Wall thing, the one with Hollywood money behind it. They're doing all kinds of technical support, camera work, that sort of thing. Last time I saw them was three, four... four or five months ago."

Ye Jingying has a good number of friends like that, people who used to do design and have moved into film and television. "A lot of my friends who take pictures, the ones who set out to be artists, photographers, to run their own independent studios, have all ended up on film crews. Film and TV are red-hot right now. Shoot some brain-dead TV drama or web series and a whole crew goes wild over it... Maybe everyone's under too much pressure these days and doesn't want to look at anything made with real heart."

In an atmosphere like that, keeping physical records going and holding a line on cover design looks hard to sustain. Ye Jingying doesn't see it that way.

"Hey, if you love something, it's not really 'sticking with it.' We think a bunch of broke buddies together, that, tsk, that's what makes youth worth living, right?"

Cover image from fusion and Visual China Group. Other images from billboard, medium, and crisprepository.nl.