iTunes Store to offer booklets, liner notes

Were you upset when albums were replaced by CDs because they had so much less real estate for album art and liner notes? Back in the day prerecorded music featured things like lyrics which seem to have mostly gone the way of the Dodo bird.

Then CDs dumped the long box in favor of just the jewel case, which while better for the environment, further reduced the product's footprint. And if you bought cassettes, well forget it.

When the iTunes Store launched in April 2003 all of the physical art associated with music disappeared entirely when atoms were replaced by bits.

As a consolation prize, some digital downloads include album art (usually just the cover though) and a modicum of ID3 tags like artist, album, etc. -- a huge disappointment to those that valued the physical, tactile art that used to accompany their music purchases.

In a bid to bump up sales of complete albums on its iTunes Store, Apple will begin offering interactive booklets and sleeve notes according to a report from the Financial Times.

Codenamed "cocktail" FT reports that Cupertino is working with the big four music labels (EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music Group) to launch the enhanced music service in September.

According to the report the tag-along files will be more than a bunch of PDFs. The word is that the interactive album material will include photos, lyric sheets, liner notes and possibly videos. Users will be able to click through to items that they find interesting and play songs directly from the interactive content without having to load iTunes, which sounds cool.

However they decide to do it, it sounds great to me - just no DRM, please! I've been buying a lot of my music recently on 180 gram vinyl and the liner notes, lyric booklets, heck even the album art has been a welcome flashback.

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