Credit Where Credit’s Due — Could album sleeve notes be making a comeback?

One of the greatest pleasures of being a music fan in the analog age was pulling the plastic off a brand new record and becoming engrossed in the album art and sleeve notes. In addition to providing fans with more in-depth details about the musicians, producers and engineers behind the music they loved, they also became something of an art form.

For artists, record sleeves were a way to give a nod to influences both inside and beyond music. In addition, they provided a written record of the collaborators who worked on an album, which could be important when it came to claiming royalties. For fans, sleeves were a way to become more immersed in an album and to explore the artistic inspirations of their heroes.

The pop art vision of Andy Warhol, for example, was fundamentally intertwined with the music and branding of the Velvet Underground, most memorably expressed through the iconic banana cover for their debut album. But often the connections were more loose — such as when New Order used A Basket of Roses, a still-life oil painting by French artist Henri Fantin-Latour, to adorn the cover of their second album Power, Corruption & Lies.

More art then just artwork

In addition to graphic art, authors and poets also occasionally contributed essays and text for the album sleeves of their favourite bands. One of the bizarrest examples of this was provided by Thomas Pynchon. He had built a reputation in the 70s as one of America’s most important postmodernist writers on the back of highly acclaimed novels like Gravity’s Rainbow. Despite his success, however, he had refused to conduct any interviews or engage with the media for over forty years — the only photos of him that existed in the public domain dated back to his high school yearbook. Thus, it came as quite a surprise when he broke cover in 1996 to pen an essay for the liner notes of Nobody’s Cool, the second album by the relatively unknown indie band Lotion. The band claimed that they had met Pynchon when he turned up at one of their gigs wearing a Godzilla t-shirt. Sadly, the truth was a little more mundane: they had met him through his accountant, who happened to be the drummer’s mother.

So why do we have nothing similar to sleeve notes these days? Although it might seem that digitisation killed sleeve notes, it wasn’t always this way. One of the first social networks with massive adoption, Myspace, built its network by allowing bands to create a customised online space to showcase their work. Over time, however, social networks like Facebook and streaming platforms like Spotify prioritised a clean user interface and speed of browsing over customizability. Thus, the immersive audiovisual experience that many music lovers remember so fondly from the days of records was not effectively emulated in the digital age. Writing for Gizmodo, Whitney Kimball argues that the failure of highly customizable sites like Myspace has made music discovery more algorithmically driven and less social:

“…today there’s no parallel. Myspace was originally designed so that you could go down a rabbit hole of bands’ pages, finding who influenced each other from their friends and posts, making it easy for non-coastal local bands to get followings and book shows. Those unknowns certainly aren’t coming up on your algorithmically-sorted feed.”

Traditional album sleeves also served an important practical purpose for more established artists, by listing all of the collaborators who worked on an album. Sadly, on most digital platforms, credits tend to be limited to the songwriters and main performers, leaving producers, technicians, session musicians and other collaborators without any recognition. This is a problem because receiving proper recognition in album credits can be an important first step towards receiving fair royalties.

Curious to know more? Join our Telegram group — UtopiaMusic