What You Don’t Get for Your Ninety-Nine Cents…
Jill Sobule (of the old-school “I Kissed a Girl” fame) has a point in this recent Huffington Post blog entry: what’s missing when you download a song/album from iTunes or some other music service is all that cool information you would normally get if you bought the CD and read the booklet. Who played drums on Track 5? Whom would the artist like to thank? Little tidbits like that just aren’t there in most cases (although I hasten to add that many artists have now made digital booklets available for download, but you usually have to buy the whole album in order to get those).
From an artists’ standpoint, I can see why Sobule and others miss the booklet–that’s where the credit lies. All the studio musicians and lesser-known band members’ work, while still shining in the sound of the song itself, doesn’t get any recognition in the fixed form of a text. And how many fans are going to be interested and thoughtful enough to do the research to find out who played what on which song?
Well, me, actually–although I’d rather someone save me the trouble. I’m one of those dorky people who sits down and reads the entire CD booklet when she buys a new CD because I want to know everything I can (Did you know that Dave Grohl plays drums on Pete Yorn’s “For Us” from the disc Nightcrawler? Do you even know who Pete Yorn is? Because if you don’t, you should). As a recent immigrant to iTunes, I hadn’t even realized I was missing studio credits and liner notes because most of what I was downloading were “replacement CDs”–works by artists I’d bought years ago when albums were still on cassette. It’s only lately when I’ve downloaded a full CD that was released a few years ago that I’m only just now getting around to purchasing (now that I can do so with a click of a mouse, considering I live in a town with one small record store), that I’ve started to realize what Sobule bemoans in her blog.
Maybe it’s only music trivia dorks like me who miss the booklet, and maybe it’s folks like me who will eventually help to keep the physical CD alive. I only hope that more artists catch on to the digital booklet phenomenon. Because some of us actually do care that Dave Matthews’ solo album was recorded at Stone Gossard’s studio in Seattle and to whom Radiohead dedicated In Rainbows.
