Good article

A '75 Flashback for Digital Music
Wall Street Journal
February 28, 2005

The digital-music revolution proceeds apace, with all its associated
wonders. But oddly, in one sense the music of 2005 feels like 1975.

Back before the original incarnation of MTV -- an age in which the Walkman
was gaped at like the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey -- one of the
great mysterious music moments was finding out what that band with the new
song stuck in your head or climbing the pop charts looked like. If you were
a kid, this revelation often came through a peek at an older brother or
sister's Rolling Stone or People, staying up late to see Saturday Night Live
or Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, or going to the mall and staring up at the
records in the new-release racks.

However you got to this point, the reaction was usually the same: "That's
what Fleetwood Mac look like? No way!" Jace can't ever remember a band
looking like he'd thought they would, and the disparity between reality and
what he'd imagined was often startling, to say the least.

After MTV became a phenomenon in the early 1980s, this "no way" moment
basically ceased to exist for popular acts: For more than a decade, to hear
Madonna, Def Leppard, Duran Duran and other artists of that time was to see
them, too -- and many a music fan had the odd experience of realizing some
new hit songs just weren't as compelling on the radio or on the stereo,
which stripped them of their accompanying videos.

What changed? The biggest thing was that MTV and VH1 cut back dramatically
on the number of videos they played, finding they got better ratings and
more attention for game shows like "Singled Out" and reality numbers like
"Real World" and "Newlyweds." Today, there are video channels such as the
Fuse and the just-relaunched MTV2 trying to fill the music-television niche
that MTV once owned. But for whatever reason, none of them has achieved the
reach or importance that MTV had -- and that's meant that for many, popular
musicians are once again heard rather than seen.

Oddly, the other factor in reducing musicians' visual presence has been the
Internet itself -- and it's reduced it in ways that 1975's music fans would
find startling, despite the fact that they rarely if ever saw a video.

1975 was the age of the LP, which meant umpteen hours of poring over album
art, lyrics, liner notes and whatever else came with a favorite record -- a
process generally begun even before LP hit turntable, as you tried to puzzle
out which songs would be good based on lyrics and titles alone. (Supergeeks
of a certain age will even remember that you could get some idea of a song's
sound by looking at how dense the grooves within the track were. A long,
basically blank stretch within a track meant trouble, particularly if it was
part of a bloated rock opera with passages marked in Roman numerals. We mean
you, Rush.)

One thing that drives CD haters particularly insane is the way standard CD
packaging crunched artwork and accompanying material down to a much-smaller
footprint. But at least that material still existed -- with digital
downloads, the most you typically get is a small image of the album cover
displayed when your jukebox software plays that album's songs. With digital
downloads, album art is now barely bigger than a postage stamp, and liner
notes and lyrics are basically gone.

Yes, some artists and labels have tried to present that material in
different ways -- download U2's "How to Dismantle an Atom Bomb," for
instance, and you'll get the contents of the CD booklet as a PDF. But as
with many efforts to read for pleasure in the digital age, sitting in an
office chair scrolling and magnifying PDFs is a far cry from sprawling on
the rec-room couch with an album jacket. (This is even worse for jazz buffs:
Jazz albums actually have liner notes with something to say.)

But wait, you say -- virtually every band with a record deal now has its own
Web site. Try that in 1975!

True -- today anybody with a Web browser can dive into a new band's bio,
discography and photos with a few mouse clicks, and more and more bands
offer sample MP3s and other goodies. But the difference is that's material
you have to go out and get -- it doesn't come to you the way MTV did. Does
that matter? It may: For many people, music is something they absorb while
doing something else, rather than something they actively want to interact
with.

It'll be years until we know what, if anything, this loss of visuals will
mean for bands trying to forge their own identities in an increasingly
fragmented, winner-take-all music world. In the meantime, as listeners we're
probably even worse at deciphering lyrics than we used to be. And those of
us of a certain age may find ourselves in a time warp, saying things we
thought we'd said for the last time back in the Reagan administration:
"That's what the Killers look like? No way!"

http://online.wsj.com/articles/real_time