Record label runs out of covers

Record label runs out of covers

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norman lebrecht

April 22, 2020

This is Harmonia Mundi’s cover for a new Pärt, MacMillan album.

Two years ago, this was a Henning Kraggerud release on Simax.

There are no new ideas in the record biz, only bad old ones.

Comments

  • Peter says:

    Doesn’t one buy Recordings for the content rather than the cover picture. Personally I wouldn’t mind if every CD had the same art work, as long as the details were clearly marked.

    • Jack says:

      A world where all album covers were the same would be akin to a world where all music was the same. How boring.

  • Monsoon says:

    If only the Friedrich estate collected royalties for all of the album covers that use “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.”

  • alvaro says:

    “Creative Industry”

  • Noah L says:

    I’m sure the two people that actually purchased both albums noticed….

  • Ron Swanson says:

    It’s just stock art bought off a site. Dependent on the number of sales they are expecting is would cost them in the region of £1000 for non exclusive use.

    • SVM says:

      How lazy and unimaginative! In that case, it would have been better not to have any cover art at all (and might have saved a bit of money in the process). Alas, I have seen similar sins committed by at least one big academic publisher (which strikes me as particularly unforgivable, given that it is perfectly respectable to publish a book or music score without any cover art, and given also that academic books are often horrifically expensive).

  • Mustafa Kandan says:

    Ever since the demise of LP’s ( the current resurrection of this medium is not very convincing) I have never cared much about the covers, but much more about the lack of legible documentation and librettos,etc. on CD’s. I still think that in spite of these flows, CD”s are still much more preferable to LP’s and even more to downloading.

  • CYM says:

    – In these difficult times, may I recommend multiple CD covers for each album.
    – For exemple, Verdi ‘A Masked Ball’, making sure you remove the cover before sanitizing the CD.

  • Unknown says:

    REALLY?!!!?? So many other things that you could do to uplift the “souls” of those STILL reading your output of “news.” — TRY HARDER to Be KIND, please. It’s all we have left folks.

    • SVM says:

      Being “kind” should not entail a dereliction of critical judgement. Manifest lack of originality in the cover art is a perfectly legitimate criticism (personally, I think it better to have *no* cover art than bad/boring/inappropriate/lazy/unimaginative cover art). Many readers of Slipped Disc are professional musicians and/or intelligent connoisseurs who get frustrated with the sloppiness, corruption, and poor standards that are tolerated all to often, and find it “uplifting” that somebody with clout is holding offenders to account, whether they be record labels, the senior management of big opera companies, or competition juries. Often, we musicians are unwilling to be the first to “stick one’s head above the parapet” and stand up to such offenders, for fear of professional consequences (cf. Richard Morrison observing that orchestra managers are afraid of expressing disagreement with bureaucrats in Arts Council England… I disagree with Morrison on many things, and have previously called for him to be blacklisted from receiving complimentary tickets due to his inappropriate and irrelevant remarks about some opera singers, but I agree with his point about the importance of music notation in education).

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