Hindsight will give us a better understanding of the last decade. It will take time to fully digest the breadth of music that was released and how it all fits together. As for the death of physical media: I'll admit, I prefer the tangible over the digital. But, like Luke said, increased availability has created much more awareness and appreciation for the music itself. I'm cool with that.
sometimes I really believe Jordan is one of the smartest members on this forum, because he can actually understand what I'm trying to communicate, even when I don't do it so well. The presentation of music is dead. When I say art, I mean that literally. The music isn't dead, if anything, people are being more creative than they've been in years since they don't have to wait a year to release it. To reiterate, since some people in this thread can't distinguish the difference between ART and MUSIC... the presentation of music is dead. I would love to see someone argue against that, when a high percentage for album sales are accounted for by iTunes and Amazon MP3 and whatnot.
I think people generally realise what you were referring to. We were just expressing our own views in regards to whether or not it matters.
I like good album art too, but just because I don't bemoan its increasing irrelevance doesn't make me less of a fan.
And I feel sorry for someone who can't appreciate a good song without having pretty pictures coming with it.
Enjoy your iTunes and MP3s, guys. I'll sit here with my vinyl and CD collection and enjoy the music how it was meant to be enjoyed: as a whole, not just a collection of songs on a computer.
Things like radio and television in the last 50 years have caused music to be enjoyed in ways detached from their covers. However, if all you have is an argument from tradition anyway it is fallacious whether or not that tradition exists.
Well yeah...that is the only important thing. With booklets and such, you can't tell me that you stare at them every time you play a song. Maybe within the first week you get the album, but after that, it's all about the song. And what we're all saying is that we'd rather have more music more often than less music with pictures that you hardly look at.
Well this is what I've got for the past decade so far: I'd say in the US anyway that the early 00s ('00-'01 and some of '02) was a lot of the same late 90's soft rock, teeny boppers, and R&B (i.e. Destiny's Child), which was followed by a (very) brief resurgence of metal and punk ('02ish-'04), such as Linkin Park and Yellowcard, P.O.D., Evanescence, New Found Glory, Good Charlotte, and their ilk. At the same time we have a new sort of hip hop arising (at least to my ears hip hop of '02 and later sounds like somewhat of a departure), and so that's people like Fat Joe, R. Kelly, OutKast, B2K, etc. After that was the rise of emo and other forms of throwback music like garage rock and punk-gone-straight Green Day (so that's '04ish-'07) and that includes Panic!, FOB, The White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, the Killers, RHCP (i.e. Dani California), etc. At the same time we had what will probably become some of the decade's most recognizable hip hop and R&B tunes (and I consider it to be the decade's best, but you're free to disagree of course): Yeah! by Usher, Golddigger by Kanye, Crazy by Gnarls Barkley (I know it's closer to soul), Apologize by Timbaland and OneRepublic, Justin Timberlake, etc. For the end of this era I'd point to songs like Hey There Delilah, Paper Planes by M.I.A., Handlebars by the Flobots, etc. And then we have the 2008-2009 era, which I consider some of the worst and weirdest of the decade. This is Lady GaGa, Rihanna, the Black Eyed Peas' new (terrible) electro-hop sound; I remember at one point these artists were labelled on Wikipedia as the rise of "nu-disco." Also I feel like there was a brief period in which indie music became pretty popular, but I'm not sure if that's a product of my going to college, my piqued interest in indie around that time, or something else. The most solid evidence I have for the indie resurgence is in film of the late 00's, such as "indie-style" films such as Juno and Where the Wild Things Are, in which such music is featured very prominently. I also think I remember a couple of "dance" groups such as Metro Station becoming pretty popular around 2008 or so. That's the best I've got for the latter era though, as I have no idea what was happening in straight-up pop, country, and rock. As for 2009 in particular, this is what I've got: Lady GaGa's fame continues its ascent and is joined briefly by Green Day's 21st Century Breakdown, a smaller hit than its predecessor, and then the death of Michael Jackson. At this point my trail through popular music at the time gets hazy amid all the Jackson hype, and then I remember some Taylor Swift, and that the #1 hit going into the new year and decade was Hey, Soul Sister by Train, which stayed very high in the charts well into 2010. This is all the product of intense research and really making an effort to expose myself to popular music when I got into college. If anyone has found any holes that need to be filled in or I'm just dead wrong about something, the help would be greatly appreciated.
This was what I was trying to say, thanks. The people from over 90years ago would not find this method of enjoying music traditional in any sense at all. Art is not meant to be stuck in one way of doing things, chained down. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't really looked at history very well. That sounds good to me.
Yeah but, saying Casey is "dead wrong" and then you, esaul etc. directly agreeing with Luke, makes it sound more like an attack than a discussion of opinions :/. That's mostly where I stop mostly in the argument, but - I feel like people will never really treasure something like vinyl again (though I also feel that the vinyl medium is if anything becoming more popular in the last couple years), and it's kind of a sad thing, moving all art we know onto digital formats. Does anyone even own a painting/sketch/whatever here? My parents have a couple pieces up on the wall, but in my 16 years of life buying cds, records, books, comics, movies - I've never bought a painting at all. Literal art is pretty much a tool of advertising now, and music will probably be the same if you take it by the song - rather than appreciating the package as an art medium itself. Though I'm mostly a hypocrite, with my ~50 cds and 6 records on my desk - and 500gbs+ of flac/mp3s on my computer. My claim is that I can actually spend hours walking through record shops, and I can't say the same for going to what.cd/waffles and looking through random torrent groups...
You make a good point ... but music is still an form of art, regardless of what packaging it comes in.
Yeah, the art that goes along with music is dead/dying. I don't care. If I want art I go buy stuff to put around my house and in my room. Art that I can appreciate. I have 10 hand-crafted things on my wall in my room alone. Now that kind of art is awesome. I think people overestimate how cool album artwork really is. However, if bands had people like Mike in them who are artistic and put out their own album artwork for their fans, then I'd really enjoy that. But that isn't how it works. The band pays someone to make some average drawing/painting and it's not personal at all. I say what's the big deal about that?
Well, for me, good album artwork doesn't always but can go a long way to helping me appreciate an album, which is supposedly meant to be audio and visual content complementing one another. Seems there might be some releases where visuals play a larger role than others, but that number is, yes, rapidly dwindling. For me, packaging is a big deal; if I want an album, it's the packaging that will sell me on a physical version.
Well, it wasn't an attack, at least as far as I'm concerned, and I'm sorry if it came off that way. I doubt it was for the other people who agreed either.
Jordan, I don't know where you're getting that notion from but I wasn't attacking Casey and from what I can tell, no one else was either. It was a disagreement of opinion, end of.