The British  newspaper The Independent has set off a fiery debate in both the music and pop art worlds over the future of the album cover. Most notably, legendary album cover artist Peter Saville, the man behind the covers of Unknown Pleasures, Blue Monday, and This is Hardcore, argued, "We have a social disaster on our hands," that the thrill that once afforded a generation by seeing their rock heroes' faces on albums jackets are dying out in the current generation:

"When I was 15, in the North-west of England.... the record cover to me was like a picture window to another world. Seeing an Andy Warhol illustration on a Velvet Underground album was a revelation.... It was the art of your generation... true pop art."

Says Rick Wakeman, formerly of Yes: "With downloads and everything... it's just killing the whole art side of music stone dead. To be quite honest, unless you have 20-20 vision it's very hard to read anything written on a CD cover. There was something very special about [vinyl] albums... it's a great shame."

But many bloggers have countered the claims that the declining prominence of album art equates to a disaster. Andy Day of Gigwise notes that iTunes and iPods still gives promonent placing to album art, even as they forgo the rest of the album jacket (including the lyrics). Over at the MusicRadar blog, Joe Bosso admits that music fans no longer feel the thrill he once did when he first saw the album cover to Quadrophenia, but that in an age when "Exclusive photos, blogs, tour dates, streaming tracks, downloads, [and] behind-the-scenes videos" are all readily available on the internet, the need for album art has become less strong.

The basic difference amounts to what you believe the purpose of album art to be. If you consider album art a legitimate form of art in and of itself, then yes, the state of affairs is depressing. But if you consider album art a way of getting to know the band behind the album better, things have gotten better, not worse. One note I will make is that the decline of artwork has decreased the priority on recognizing musicians' faces. I'll never forget when I attended an Evens concert two years ago and Steve Albini and Mike Watt went largely unnoticed in the crowd. No doubt most of the audience knew who they were by name, but many fewer actually recognized them by face. That's more depressing than not recognizing a naked women prepared like a turkey.

[The Independent (U.K.)]