Andy Chase

The price of the Compact Disc format's high fidelity was the loss of real estate for cover art and inserts... posters, tattoos, and cardboard spaceships, stuff to obsess over while you listen (until you have to get up and flip the LP.)

Now half the surface area of the average CD insert is taken up by piracy warnings and UPC symbols, and you can certainly forget about anything beyond the booklet and the CD itself! Print is so tiny it's hard if not impossible to read the microscopic lyrics and/or list of people each band member wants to thank.

With electronically purchased music you might get a PDF booklet if you're lucky, but what are you supposed to do with it, really? Painstakingly attempt to print it double-sided, cut it out, then staple it together? Most tracks on the iTunes music store contain a single, low-resolution image of the front cover, and that's all... no personnel notes, lyrics, or anything else.

I do love having all of my music in digital format, playable in seconds from a device I can carry with me at all times... but sometimes I miss the ritual of picking out something to listen to, pulling the album out of the sleeve and setting it up on the turntable, then settling back and just listening to it while turning the sleeve back in forth in my hands.

I am not alone.