So hey, Maura Johnston has an excellent interview over at eMusic with Teenbeat founder Mark Robinson.
This bit is interesting, and — I’d think — gets at a lot of what’s good about both physical and digital distribution of music.
What do you think of digital distribution’s effects on the presentation of albums?
My main beef right now is that for some reason all our covers that we’re sending through our digital distributor are coming out fuzzy, which really drives me crazy. I have mixed feelings about it, ’cause I still like the physical artifact. But I also like that music is actually becoming music, instead of something to look at. And I love albums, but I also like that you can just buy one song, which is great.
It’s worth mentioning that the archival CD-R releases that they’re doing both look and sound great. It’s also worth mentioning that Robinson and Tae Won Yu are credited with the design of Versus’s new album On the Ones and Threes, and the look of it is terrific; I’ve got the gatefold LP, and it’s the sort of — dare I say opulent? — opulent design that works really well at a large size.
The album itself? Also pretty terrific.