At the risk of going off topic: it feels like modern day Apple's priorities have shifted a lot from the Apple I grew up with, and many things they used to put front-and-center are falling by the wayside, out of neglect.
This isn't some generic "they don't care about the mac anymore" refrain, but I think there is a major sea change underway at the company. I think I will write soon about all of the hints, as I see them.
It's almost as if, top-notch attention-to-detail doesn't scale automatically. Your company going from $4B->$40B->$400B->$2T is going to evolve culturally speaking, and it seems the effort to instill quality over the bottom $line is simply not possibly unless you choose to "leave money on the table".
I've noticed Apple does best PR wise when they do the latter, but it's hard for me to find examples of them doing that recently.
It takes a huge amount of time and money to go to the insane lengths of Apple-ism that the company is known for.
I would venture to say that 80% of that doesn't translate to an increase in revenue. How many people bought a 2019 Mac Pro because of the speaker inside of it?
They're slowly but steadily trimming this "waste". The products are becoming merely "great", but no longer insanely so. The age of Sane Apple, perhaps.
Apple seems to be significantly more focused on building revenue (especially from services) than on building the most insanely great things that can possibly exist (with revenue as a side effect).
Another example is the fact that they introduced an end-to-end encrypted messaging system that
rapidly became a widespread standard... then backdoored it for the FBI (via the non-end-to-end-encrypted iCloud Backup). That isn't so much an indicator of Apple's new values... except that the KB article about what is and isn't e2e encrypted in iCloud is designed to deliberately confuse and mislead people into thinking the situation is better than it is. That's very un-Apple, if you ask me.
Apple used to be "the computer for the rest of us", the pirate-flag-flyers. Now they primarily make Facebook/Candy Crush client hardware.
This comment is obviously a massive oversimplification, and I want to write properly on it in detail and at length soon.
It seems like a company that has had many eras, so it's more subtle than the "good old days vs bad new focus" outlook.
They're not afraid to reinvent themselves and sometimes that brings benefits and sometimes it ditches things people value. The sense of always moving towards a more and more "walled garden" view never fills me with delight and their UI ideals are nowhere near the 90s peak but they do get a heck of a lot of other things right.
This distresses me greatly. Many otherwise great UI's and devices needlessly waste screen space and display tiny album art. Why? who wants a small image in the center, surrounded by vast, boring block colour. But even worse is Apple who seem to have taken a decisive step backwards. "let's take a great display choice and break it!" Apple execs must have discussed excitedly, probably after several beers.
Why? Because some misguided designer thought it looked cool (after all, if you are a UX designer, it's your job to suggest sommething different, saying "the app looks and works great as it is, let's not change anything" doesn't quite cut it), and nobody else involved cared enough to challenge this decision?
It is because of this exact tagging issue that I never let iTunes 'manage' my library. They'd take files in perfectly labeled folders and move everything into something resembling the structure of their database.
This is a symptom of their larger problem with maintaining and overreaching when it comes to metadata. I've had scenarios where an album of music I manually added to my library (as MP3s) has had its metadata mutilated to the point where the songs were spread across several incomplete albums (differing releases of the same album) each incomplete, including some songs becoming standalone tracks from compilation albums I had never heard of. They won't just _leave it alone_.
Getting metadata right is honestly an issue that has been there for a long time. ID3v2.3 or ID3v2.4 are basically what you have to work with. Many programs also use custom TXXX or DIV tags to embed whatever into. So even if you get it right in on prog it is a disaster in another.
ID3v2.4 fixes many of the issues. But very few progs use it or default to 2.3. Plus the way an album can be sliced and diced for metadata is truly breathtaking.
Then add into that some of these programs try to use some form of acoustic id to try to find where it belongs. Which does what you are talking about. So you resort to setting the file read only so the program will not mess with the tags.
Then on top of that many of the online sources can be in bad shape for bands or releases. AC/DC is most certainly not alternative. But it is tagged that way in some databases. So data quality goes all the way from 'someone spent a lot of time getting this right' to 'someone uploaded whatever was in their mp3 library and called it a day'. Also even the data printed on the pages that came with it may have spelling errors and differences in spelling for individual tracks and artists. Some artists have 3-4 different aliases which one do you put it under without messing everything up or leave it stand alone and you forget you even had it.
Also differing releases is a pain too. Some albums have 40+ releases. Which one do you actually have. Does it really matter?
All good points, though I'll say, when I added the music, there was no mistaking what I expected to see as far as Artist name, Genre, etc. I expected that my music would remain as I had provided it.
Once that expectation was betrayed, my collection's relationship with iTunes (now Apple Music) wholly changed. No longer could it be a slouching-toward-immaculate pet project of mine to maintain and grow and detail the music I love, because I could wake up the next day to Apple having literally replaced songs I myself had ripped and added to my library years ago, with these alternate, sometimes censored or even live versions. I can't easily hear the version of Bob's "No Woman No Cry" I grew up listening to and loving, because Apple replaced that with some studio version it guessed I had when tasked with playing the song at my request, 2+ computers and several years deep into trusting Apple with my collection.
You can turn this off, at least iTunes 12. Just select the tracks that you don’t want broken apart, hit ⌘I “Song Info”, and check the checkbox “Album is a compilation of songs by various artists”.
Alternatively, as crooked-v mentioned, you can give all the tracks the same Album Artist. In your example, it sounds like “Outkast” should be the Album Artist for the whole album.
Because it's not how music works anymore. People don't go to a store and buy an album. They rent from a service where your ownership of the music stops the second you cancel your subscription.
Even then they aren't picking albums or artists. They are served mixes from a bottomless carousel of user-created or algo-generated playlists. Most of the songs sound similar, as every playlist is designed to capture a specific mood. The artist becomes interchangeable. The album the track is from becomes meaningless. There's always something further down the playlist that sounds exactly like it.
I think it's more related to how people listen to music. I would be curious if there are numbers, but just based off of talking with friends, most people listen to playlists that are either self created or curated by Apple/Spotify.
Personally, I have always been an album listener; just go start to finish. Occasionally I'll throw on a playlist I made or something curated by the streaming service I am using, but it's rare for me.
I agree. I love a great album, which is more than just a collection of songs. Also, I suck at making playlists, so I would rather just let the artist tell my how their songs should be heard.
the article is discussing an SE. The author specifically complains that it's not big enough. And anyway, that's not a good reason to waste so much space. Maybe it can be argued that it makes the overall UI of ios appear neater and more uniform, but i'm not going to state that case.
I think this is becoming less and less true. I think Mac OS isn't as good as people say it is and Windows is better than people say it is. I can't speak either way to desktop Linux.
I rarely look at the control panel. It's usually easier for me to type in what settings I'm looking for in the windows taskbar search and it pops up immediately. Although I can type in "Control panel" and go straight there as well. Seems like it may have been a while since you've used Windows.
I was a full time Windows developer (WinForms, WPF, and ASP.NET) for three years until January. I used Windows 10. Still hated it. The search worked sometimes, but that's no excuse for having more than one place to go to change system settings. Microsoft have not released a completed operating system since Windows XP.
I'm not exactly sure which settings you're talking about, but it seems like you're saying that there are multiple places a user can go to change specific settings.
If that's accurate, that is a GOOD thing from a usability perspective.
There's the "Settings" UWP app, and the older Control Panel, which itself launches lots of even older settings dialogs at various points. It's not actually good for usability that there are multiple places to change the same settings, but what's worse is that they have disjoint functionality. Some things can only be accomplished with the older Control Panel, and some things can only be accomplished with Settings. I find it hard to believe you haven't discovered this, it was an almost daily annoyance for me.
Okay, so lets assume you're the product owner for Windows settings. You have full, dictatorial control over the Windows settings experience. Windows 7 has reached maturity, and you and your team are starting planning for Windows 8 and beyond. You have identified a number of major flaws in the Windows settings experience, and you want to update it for the future. What do you do?
Note that the Windows settings codebase is huge, has thousands of possible settings options that you can set, and the specific esoteric behavior of those settings is relied on by users, developers and sysadmins every day.
MS clearly decided to re-do the settings system over multiple Windows generations because it was too big to do in a single release cycle. During the transition period, both Settings and Control Panel tooling will be available, and used by many users. Is there any other alternative?
>MS clearly decided to re-do the settings system over multiple Windows generations because it was too big to do in a single release cycle. During the transition period, both Settings and Control Panel tooling will be available, and used by many users. Is there any other alternative?
Windows 10 was released in 2015. It's been like this for six years. Things have improved incrementally over that time period, but there's just no excuse for this situation still existing. If you can't get it into one release cycle, the solution is not to release whatever half-baked thing you've finished and try to keep going with it, the solution is to wait until it's done. The current situation is strictly speaking worse than both replacing it altogether or not replacing it at all.
> the solution is not to release whatever half-baked thing you've finished and try to keep going with it, the solution is to wait until it's done
YMMV, but this approach is what causes software projects to balloon way beyond initial time requirements, and to be way out of date already when eventually released. If you're hacking on the train while it's running down the tracks, the only way to get there is small, frequent, incremental improvements; waiting until it's done will just result in it never releasing, or in the released version having tons of bugs.
>YMMV, but this approach is what causes software projects to balloon way beyond initial time requirements, and to be way out of date already when eventually released.
This is why you need to determine what your MVP is and ship when the MVP is done, rigorously. In this case, either they chose the wrong MVP, or they shipped before reaching it. Thus the current situation is a result of indecision, not agile methods. Agile is not an excuse to ship half-baked software.
Here's how I would have managed this project, for what it's worth: if we determined that migrating fully in the allotted cycles was infeasible, I would have moved all of the settings we didn't have time to migrate from the Control Panel into a command-line tool or registry keys, gotten rid of Control Panel when I shipped Settings, and then incrementally added the ones we missed back into the new view. What infuriates me most about Windows are compromises like this, which are plainly a result of prioritizing existing user workflows over creating a consistent user experience.
The main page of System Preferences has more icons than then equivalent "Settings" page in Windows 10, are you talking about something else? Sure, you can find more complex control panels further down in Windows, but the equivalent in OS X is the "defaults write" interface, which is hardly Mac-like.
Windows has been improving steadily. You can only tell by the decrease in the amount of high-profile coverage of UI gaffes. No one wants to write an article about how a new OS release just does what it should.
I bought this video game, and when I tried to find it using windows search, not only could windows search not find the video game, it literally gave me ads to purchase the video game again.
(I wholeheartedly agree that Windows has been getting better in many respects, but the hostility of that experience felt really stark to me. Quit using Ubuntu for the same reason.)
I really want to get on board with Linux as the desktop, but it’s not there yet for the average person. My package manager broke in Mint, not sure why, and I had to do some Googling and fix it. I had to reformat my wife’s Linux laptop for some reason. They both run great when they’re running, I was surprised even Microsoft Teams has a Linux binary, so it’s definitely improving. But it’s still tough to recommend to grandma.
mac seems to unfortunately be on the path to selling iphones, ipads and chromebook type devices running ios. i really wish steve jobs had believed in modern medicine. if he had, i believe we’d have much better machines.
I am concerned that Apple may try to move away from general purpose computing and more towards an Ios walled garden, but today things aren’t that bad.
The M1 is the absolute best mobile processor on the market, soundly dominating what’s available from intel and it was just released. For mobile computing Apple is very far ahead. Could we have had something better? Maybe, but better than the best is a lot to ask and these advances came largely because of the iPad and iPhone. Without apples focus there, we wouldn’t have the M1 chip.
You also bring up chromebooks which are a google product and we’re predated by “netbooks” pushed by intel. From my perspective Apple is the only company of those 3 that has not resisted selling underperforming hardware. I don’t know of any chromebooks that perform as well as the iPad Air.
i agree with everything you said for our current situation. I can still use homebrew and 3rd party dmg’s to install should I choose to. my concern is for the future, based on how ios/macos convergence seems to be progressing.
Windows is constantly turning on features for me like I searched for a file on my computer, and it went ahead and reached out to Bing and did a web search. I had to go into Regedit and do some arcane incantations to get it to stop. I feel like it has turned itself back on several times. Thank god I got it to stop downloading Candy Crush and Bubble Witch Saga or whatever nonsense they’re hoping my kid will click so they can get some sweet sweet ad impressions or whatever.
My OS is supposed to be a tool, and windows is super annoying unless you literally download Enterprise edition. Mac is okay, and I’ve been pretty pleased with how capable Linux Mint is, as long as things don’t randomly get broken (looking at you, package manager corrupting and acting weird for weeks before I finally googled and fixed it).
I was just uninstalling a program on windows. So I find the icon in the start menu, right click to open the menu and uninstall. That should run the uninstall process, right? WRONG! It opens the dated and derelict control panel. And it has a bunch of icons for all the programs I have on the computer. And the one I just right-clicked to uninstall? Not selected. Oh, but let's find it, where is it in that icon list? There is no search box to type in the name, I try typing to filter but nothing happens. I need to visually find it myself and select the icon. A new panel appears at the bottom with some nonsense info about the app. But how do I uninstall? Oh, the uninstall button actually appears at the top of the icon list, distant to the icon itself. Such and old ux paradigm, contextual buttons that appear in a random part of the interface (looks like a quick prototype by a programmer and they never bothered to get a ux person to design it).
Windows works for people because they are used to its idiosyncrasies. You know how people think their browser icon is to open the internet? It's the same with Windows, to most it's what makes the computer, they don't know otherwise. And these idiosyncrasies are taught in schools and universities in computer classes. How to use a computer has become how to do stuff in Windows and MS Office. Brings back memories from my childhood when I was the "computer expert", helping my parents and their friends fix problems in old Windows 98 and XP. At least the old windows ui was somewhat consistent.
That's just an unfounded blanket statement. There have been wild jumps in quality as well as incremental improvements and incremental deterioration in places.
Take, for example, iOS 7 which came out 7 years ago. On the one hand it brought some sorely needed modernity, on the other, it replaced a well-polished, albeit dated, style. However, on its own UI-wise it was really bad. Subsequent releases have had tremendous improvements to its many faults while introducing others, and I can't see how that could be called "a steady decline."
In addition, I hypothesize that as existing users tend to age[1], that they typically desire less change. However, newer and/or younger users entering an ecosystem may desire other things, such as the appearance of modernity or newer stylings (eg. "Not your parent's OS"). MacOS 10.x has been around for 20 years now. iOS for 13 years. Even if you were to assume that the "core segment" was 20 to 40 year old working professionals (just an example), a huge cohort has moved into, and another out of, that segment over the past 10+ years!
This is seen in many areas outside software, so I would imagine it exists here as well.
[1]: Both age as in their physical age, as well as age as in a "have been users in this ecosystem longer" sense.
The QuickTime Player wasn't that bad considering that all other media players like boxes and the best 2nd place looked like RealPlayer. Taste shifts over time and display technologies also add to our preference. It may be bad today but back then, we wanted the UI on computers to look like real electronics with a 'brushed aluminum' material finish.
Having been near the epicenter of it, this was more than just a "skeuomorphism was in" thing. It was a complete aesthetic and functional nightmare at the time. Apple employees, customers, developers, and press were horrified.
That being said, I understand that sometimes one needs to push boundaries of taste in order to make advances. I'm just sad that QuickTime Player had to be one of the sacrificial pikes upon which skeuomorphism died.
Yes, plenty of it. But one of the gift I think Steve had was to completely change course once he acknowledge something as wrong. Whether that is persuaded by someone he trust or the market.
Steve Jobs would also have been a relatively old man, whose favourite artists are still recording music the same way the were in the '60s and '70s. His design choices are unlikely to resemble that of the average consumer today.
> Apple quality and design, especially in UI, has been steadily declining for over a decade.
Remember when you had to make software updates through iTunes? This was probably the worst piece of UX ever in a mainstream OS, even worse than clicking "Start" to shut down the computer in Windows. So quality steadily declining is not an accurate description.
Debatable. They are harder to repair than ever, they eat disk IO for breakfast as swap and there's no native Linux yet because Appe can't be bothered to move a finger to help in that front.
Yeah, looks like a device specific issue wrapped with a preference on margin around the artwork. Apple could shut this guy up by expanding the album art full screen when tapped in the player view.
It's weird complaining that you can't see details in the album art anymore, when in terms of raw size and resolution the art on a newer iPhone today is larger than it was on an iPod Touch in 2012 even if it doesn't stretch all the way to the edge of the screen.
I personally like Spotify's approach to evolving album art, where artists can use full-screen video clips or other visualizations (mostly taken from their music videos).
Glad to see one of my pet peeves finally get some notice!
I too bought an iPod Touch back in 2008 because of how the player UI treated album art: as actual 'art', and deserving of a full-width display on the screen. I would meticulously tag my music library with the correct album art files precisely so that they would be displayed nicely on my portable player.
I think one reason the art got smaller is due to phone screens getting larger and higher-res. A full-width image spanning the iPhone SE would be 214 x 214 px. But on the iPhone 12 it would be 390 x 390px.
That would take up a lot of the screen's real estate, perhaps leaving less available for UI controls. Also, if digital album art tends to be low-res to begin with, it would look pixelated if displayed at full width on a high density pixel screen.
As screens have grown they’ve mostly grown vertically. If anything it should be easier to display a full-width album cover and still have plenty of room for controls and other UI chrome.
It's full screen, edge-to-edge in iOS (iPhone 11). In landscape it's acutally 100+% of the screen (which isn't great) I also use in Chrome where 40ish% of the screen is album art.
Static album cover art is more nebulous in the streaming age. What's interesting is the different approaches users and musical groups have taken to accompanying video on platforms like YouTube. There is not yet a de facto standard to replace the static square image of yesteryear, but there are a lot of interesting one-offs.
However, it still feels very limited. They're all looping cinegraphs, they don't 'do' anything.
For an example of a genuinely imaginative liner notes experience, check out the floppy disk that came with Billy Idol's ambitious 1993 effort "Cyberpunk": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjl6As2lRGU
Maybe this is my fault for not moving to Apple Music, but the iOS Music app, subjectively, is total crap ever since iOS 9.
The app no longer cleanly and easily divides music into Songs/Artists/Albums/Playlists as top-level tabs, instead shunting them into menu items within one such tab. The older apps (pre-iOS 7?) even let the user customize which top-level tabs they wanted to see (e.g. Composer).
Again, I bet a lot of this pain would go away if I started using Apple Music, but I'm bothered by a loss in UX.
It doesn't go away with Apple Music, they just shove their explore features in your face, and the experience for listening to your favorite artists still sucks.
You can still add (under Library) Composer as one of the selection options, click Edit in the top right.
However, my problem was (was it in iOS 9?) when they moved Downloaded from a permanently set toggle switch to a folder you selected. Which brought you to the exact same view as Library but with only the music on your device. And if you leave the app you may or may not end up in that same view when you return. It made more sense as a setting that you had to deliberately set or unset, not as a "view" of your content where the default was to use more bandwidth and play things you'd deliberately deleted.
> Again, I bet a lot of this pain would go away if I started using Apple Music, but I'm bothered by a loss in UX.
Nope, I just finished a 3 month trial and it never got any easier. There is no way the person in charge of this app actually uses it day to day (or maybe they've just never used Spotify?)
My biggest grievances:
- Wouldn't be ready to play what I was last listening to immediately, esp if data service was low (Spotify seems always ready to go, even if I haven't explicitly downloaded a song to cache)
- Awful recommendations -- Kept playing songs from the first Tyler, the Creator album when I was listening to vapor/synthwave radio (I like that album but they do not go together!)
I've tried Apple Music and Deezer and both just suck at keeping moods. Apple will go from calm piano to noisy experimental hip hop within 2 or 3 tracks.
Spotify recommendations, while still flawed (really every recommendation algorithm should let a user tune some parameters based on mood, like how much new stuff should be included), are by far the best I've heard.
It is basically three thing, Pre iOS 7, Post iOS 7 Music, and Apple Music.
Pre iOS7 was done under a person who understands and is passionate about Music. Steve Jobs.
iOS 7 was the first major UI redesign Apple had with iOS, all lead by Jony Ive. Going from Hardware Industrial Design to everything "Design". Throwing out everything that Apple UX, UI, HID had over the years. Basically Jony Ive hated Skeuomorphic design ( Previously Lead by Scott Forstall ) so much he throw everything out. Not sure if he just hated Scott or the design. Or possibly both. But it took Apple years to finally walk back on all those decisions. ( The same to Apple Store, but that is another story )
Apple Music was initially just Beats. The whole App design was about that stupid "Next Song" they keep promoting, also from Beats. It was Jimmy Iovine's idea that the computer / iPhone would magically know your mood and play the next song. And somehow Eddy Cue was sold into it. If you ignore the marketing crap, what Jimmy Iovine wanted was for people to discover new music. By either using AI, curated playlist or Apple Radio. For a long time Apple Music doesn't even have repeat the same song button. And the whole UI was designed for you to "discover" music. As a true music nerd this may have been OK, for normally user this is just stuffing random piece of music in front of their face. It wasn't until a few years later they finally accepted defeat and accept the fact the users knows what they want to listen. And what song or artist they are looking for, as well as repeating the same god damn song hundreds of time.
That is how we arrived at today's Apple Music UX. Which might have been OK for any other company and consumer / user. But in my view, still a bloody pile of crap. Instead they are so focused on the social justice aspect and keep telling the media how Apple's paid out to music labels are 10% higher than Spotify. And continue to push Free Trial hoping to push for higher services revenue.
Maybe album cover art is just less meaningful in the year 2021. I couldn't care less what the album art looks like when listening to music on Spotify or YouTube.
What I do care about is a current "About" tab in Spotify, a WikiPedia page, or maybe a well-maintained webpage for/by the artist.
Not meant to be an indictment of visual art of this type, just suggesting that perhaps the "vector" needs to shift elsewhere.
Yeah my first though on reading the article title was "neither do I." I'd find a little information about the album (date; what number album it is from that artist; collaborators) way more useful than the art.
> Maybe album cover art is just less meaningful in the year 2021.
Maybe cover art is less meaningful *to you*. FTFY. To the author it is meaningful.
Today UX/UI teams are making decisions for everyone and not allowing anyone to deviate from those decisions. Less and less apps offer users a choice via a settings UI. To me the fix is simple allow users to customize their UI.
> Maybe cover art is less meaningful to you. FTFY. To the author it is meaningful.
The author admits they're in a niche:
> The fact of the matter is that nobody cares about cover art.
So they're aware that really most people don't really care any more. Like most people these days I listen to music for the music, not the physical media artwork.
In the 2012 version of iTunes for iOS a user can flip the iPod Touch/iPhone horizontally to view cover flow. So I would I consider that a user choice. For everyone else, where album art did not matter, one could keep the device in vertical orientation.
The author mainly has an observation. To me, it looked like they were writing for emphasis and not as an indictment about Apple's view of artists or anything.
Cover art is no longer useful for music discovery or intriguing fans when an album "drops". Those were UX/UI things last ... century. Now they aren't. They're vestigial embellishments at best.
But then why isn't Apple Music a big list of songs, like iTunes from 2004? I'd actually prefer that. The Apple Music streaming interface instead has headshots of artists I don't care about or abstract images for each "category". Like a lot of modern UX, it's the worst of all worlds: wasting a ton of space for the purpose of aesthetics while being less useful than earlier iterations - at least to me.
But on the topic of Apple, I would say its just not that deep. Their UI/UX is factoring in the relevance of certain things, while also using some of the image metadata that all their audio files have associated with them. The graphics team factored in an ongoing music collector culture and their own preference and the medium its being played on (the phone and app system). It wouldn't be surprising if a future update did have basically a simple list, with a drilled-in view of what's playing, similar to most other music discovery apps.
> Cover art is no longer useful for music discovery or intriguing fans when an album "drops". Those were UX/UI things last ... century. Now they aren't. They're vestigial embellishments at best.
What level of quantitative evidence would you like to see?
Would you prefer if replaced "no longer useful" with "has diminished significance such that it is ultimately vestigial"?
In my world it is plainly obvious that music discovery occurs from algorithmic introductions, which are counted, and the song being played which is also captured by audio listening apps which is also counted.
In the past, cover art would have been an advertisement for an album that contained songs which weren't out yet, and also useful when browsing physical albums in a store. Both of which is pretty much not happening at all, I mean feel free to correct me if your world still has that. I remember people used to complain about all the other songs on albums not being as interesting as the one song they wanted, the people are the market and the market chose something else which evolved to a completely different form of music discovery.
I don't have a paper on that. Is it really moot if this is a shared experience? I think there are a lot of people that are just uncomfortable that the world changed and they never stopped to notice, and without a counterpoint thats how you sound to me. But if that's not the case, I'm totally open to a conversation as I don't have strong opinions on the matter and am also totally content with music discovery today, which doesn't emphasize cover art for easily understandable reasons, to me.
> Maybe album cover art is just less meaningful in the year 2021
This might be too broad of a generalization. I find a lot of cover art quite interesting, and I hope it remains prominent. I think a (dis)like for cover art might just be a personal preference.
Covert art is also... art. It's a shame that we've pretty much lost the concept of video-game cover art these days, it'd be a bigger shame to lose album art for the same reason.
When I listen to music on Spotify or whatever, I do still pay attention to the cover art and spend a moment to just admire it if it catches my eye.
Fair enough -- I was really trying to say that I think album art needs a reconceptualization, starting with the manner in which it's delivered to the listener.
In an abstract sense, the association of visual art with music, is, of course, a good thing that I'm sure is here to stay.
UPDATED TO ADD: Perhaps the abstract concept of "album" is what needs to go the way of the dodo.
I think this all ties back to listening habits. I find individuals who share this opinion are typically stream-primary listeners who mostly listen to playlists, singles, and generated "radio" stations (which is entirely valid! Not to mention that's the way most people listen to music, nowadays.)
However, there are nonetheless lots of people like myself that primarily listen to albums, maintain their own digital libraries, and use streaming platforms as a glorified "trial" platform for new music. I find those who tend to listen to music like I do really care about high resolution album art (and by extension the quality and accuracy of track metadata).
Frankly, since both needs are so widely different, I'm not sure there's any one solution for both. Goodness knows Apple Music tries, but to OP's point, it's clearly not succeeding in this effort.
Like this comment [0] elsewhere on this post so very well points out, everything digital is skeuomorphic....
> use streaming platforms as a glorified "trial" platform for new music
... and it seems like the skeumorphism has changed from being a digital analog of a personal record library, to being of a record store. The "library" aspect of it has become more like just the featured section of the store.
Give it a try. You will find there is a lot to discover and close connection to the music. Then try looking at the booklet of an album. Pro level: read the liner notes.
It will be amazing how much information there is and to learn about the thought process of the artist while creating the album.
We only began thinking of it as 'album art' in the iPod age, 20 years ago. That's because digital products could only show the front cover, and not the liner notes that accompanied it.
I think the last CD I bought was in 2005, and there was a 7 year gap before I bought my first vinyl. I had completely forgotten that albums used to come with lyrics, trivia and pictures of the band.
> Maybe album cover art is just less meaningful in the year 2021. I couldn't care less what the album art looks like when listening to music on Spotify or YouTube.
Do you listen to full albums or just mixes/random?
I see it much less important for the latter but significant for the former. For a lot of the albums I listen the cover art complements the music/message of the album. I really like it and it enhances my music listening experience.
I grew up in the 70s, and spent most of my life listening to music as albums, but that time is pretty much passed. What percent of new music is even released as albums any more?
My impression is most music is still released as albums although I don't have numbers. I assume there are various reasons why it makes sense for a band to produce and release a batch of music at the same time (especially given that vinyl and CDs are still a thing, even if a much reduced thing).
Eh, I see this more as a shift in consumer design patterns overall.
At the launch of the iphone, everything was skeumorphic. The cover flow clearly emulated flipping through a stack of records or CD books.
Now that people don't have physical media, the metaphor changes. The new design treats the cover art like an avatar on a forum or social media site -- a small thumbnail to identify the music.
Additionally, the original iPod/iPhone typically used internal storage in your Library. Under the Apple Music era of streaming, this may be a decision to shave a few % off of bandwidth costs by only pushing lower-resolution images. And then the choice being made to not upscale low-res to screen-width and incur blurriness.
I do the same thing! I find that with vinyl I’m more likely to listen to the whole album. With streaming, I’ll hear a song I like, remember another song, hop around all over the place.
This was (is?) the idea behind Paper & Plastick Records [0] in the MP3 heyday. The "paper" is a download code, and the "plastick" is a vinyl record along with it. Pretty fun concept IMO.
Vinyl record sales in 2020 surpassed CDs for the first time since the 1980s:
"Vinyl records accounted for $232.1 million of music sales in the first half of the year, compared to CDs, which brought in only $129.9 million. ... Since 2005, sales for vinyl have grown consecutively. In the first half of 2020, vinyl revenue was up 4%, while CD revenue was down 48%, according to the RIAA."
From a purely financial point of view, if that's all that matter, yes, you may compare streaming/vinyl/CDs.
... those are _different_ markets:
- Streaming is about subscription to a right to listen to music passing by, attached to a specific set of account (with all the metrics that come with it).
- Vinyl is about physical analog copies that you can transmit to someone across space and time and that are barely trackable.
Edit: but indeed, huge markets crush small ones...
But, like books, that's the only way my kids and their kids may keep the actual artefact of something that I did read or listen to (be it a book, or a vinyl).
So, if I appreaciate/care about what it is/says, I get a physical copy of it so I can give it to someone. Otherwise I know it's lost to them.
For the most part I agree, although if I'm going to buy an entire album digitally, I do sometimes just buy the CD and rip it if the price is about the same.
That said, I finally got my music library cleaned up and decided to fill in some holes. But, at that point, I also decided I might as well just use subscription downloads from Apple Music. It's all very mainstream older stuff and if I do decide at some point, I want copies I own I can buy them if I want. But no need to spend the money right now just so I know I own everything.
Sounds about right. Streaming is about being able to listen to anything you want. Vynil is about keeping what you like.
My Spotify history is full of songs and playlists which I don't even like, and I use it to explore other genres and artists. It's reasonable that only 5% of everyday people listen to is good enough to be acquired permanently.
Sometimes it’s reversed. Spotify has less than 50% of the artists and albums I have on CDs and I have been tempted to buy missing songs on vinyl. Spotify’s playlists also rot, roughly 1% of songs disappear per year.
Have in mind the vinyl market share isn't too far from the MacOS market share a couple of years ago. I see it as the premium niche, something we can't just ignore, especially if we consider the growth.
It seems like an opportunity for Apple to create a "vinyl filter" for Music, like a photo filter, to simulate the slight EQ profile and the physical scraping of playing a song on a turntable. I mean, if you really want it to sound worse, go ahead. It's no different than applying a "Polaroid" filter to a modern digital camera snapshot.
I think that would be the worst of both worlds, the good part of digital media are no rewinding, in your pocket, on demand. And the benefit of physical are big artwork, tangible, one copy. It is not about the sound of vinyl, but having it in your hands.
Besides, what in the digital realm is not skeuomorphism to begin with?
Every single item in the digital world down to a pixel (off of the `pt` points system) we see online is skeuomorphic inspiration off of something! Typesetting and the alphabet is skeuo off the typewriter systems/foundry, buttons––of course skeuomorphism, web-page and scrolling follow from pulp and physical scrolls, header, footer, body inspire off of letterheads.
Anyone who claims 'skeuomorphism this, but !skeuomorphism that' is a digital noob and doesn't quite understand where the world has been and how it got here.
There is a difference between (1) being able to trace design inspiration back to something non-digital, and (2) skeumorphic design. The latter is more about making a nostalgic leap back to a specific pre-digital aesthetic, painstakingly hiding the interim steps.
The difference may be subject to nuance and debate, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Wow, that page is spectacularly broken on Chrome mobile: it disables zoom so that I can't see the whole graph, and if I view it using 'Desktop version' the page becomes unresponsive due to either too much Javascript, or due to CSS hacking.
Sadly, I think it's just that the world has moved on from albums as "coveted" goods that you treasure to just being commodities. With music streaming services, each album isn't as precious as the old days where you'd actually purchase a CD, a cassette, or a vinyl record. There's just so much music out there now, and so readily available. IMHO, as a result, how albums are presented is now just an afterthought.
Check out discogs.com. Most music listeners don't covet their physical media anymore, but there are still millions of people globally who buy and trade vinyl, and even CDs.
Anecdotally, I have a friend who collects rare underground CDs from the mid-2000's because vinyl hadn't been revived yet and digital streaming wasn't big yet, so some bands who were only active during that time only ever put out CDs. And personally I have a few dozen vinyl albums that came out in the last 10 years.
With the vinyl revival, I expect album art will still continue to be important to niche music collectors, and any artist who releases in full-album format (many artists just do singles now, so that won't apply to them I'm sure).
Yeah, interestingly I've been buying vinyl from independent artists when I can, and usually they'll include codes to download the digital format. I finally bought a record player a few months ago and have been enjoying the experience of just focusing on playing one album at a time.
Worse imo, the artist listing using photos of the band or artist as the image instead of a cover of an album - which makes it useless for visual scanning.
Spotify on the desktop is also guilty of this: the default cover art view is microscopic; clicking the "expand" button brings it up to a merely small view.
Agree. But I think the overall reason is obvious: customers don't care about album art either. If they did (and used their buying power to show this), Spotify / Apple would change their products.
I care about album art and am frustrated with both Apple and Spotify. Does anyone have suggestions where I should direct my buying power so I can listen to music and view high res album art?
I buy Vinyl, but most new Vinyl releases suck. They just stuff a bunch of songs on 3 or 4 sides that end up half empty, so you need to flip the record all the time.
> A standard 12-inch 33 RPM vinyl record can have a playtime of roughly 22 minutes per side for a total of 44 minutes. A 7-inch 45 RPM record can fit approximately 5 minutes per side for a total of 10 minutes. Generally, any longer, the sound quality would start to deteriorate.
On classic vinyl releases you got a single record with roughly 20 minutes of music on each side. They recorded the album so it fit nicely on two sides.
With new releases the vinyl is usually an afterthought, so it usually doesn't fit nicely on two sides, so they just throw an extra disc in the sleeve and spread the songs evenly and you end up with 3 or 4 sides with 12-15 min music on them.
There is no buying power on Spotify? There's different preferences that hardly come out of UI usage patterns since for those in love with album art there isn't a way to make it central. It's just not there.
I would offer it's a generational thing. If you came from vinyl or early CD, with books with lyrics and recognisable artworks you've just got expectations or wishes that aren't being fulfilled anymore. No value judgement, I get that young people discover music wholly differently. There's survivorship bias in there as well, but I know the labels, recordings and albums I want my song or aria to be from by picture. And I'll probably listen to those specific albums and recordings until I pass, so 50 more years of caring for specific album art here.
I love vinyl and half the reason I buy it is because of the artwork, but I've also had and love my Spotify account and have had one since the month the service came to the USA.
Folks complaining about Apple and art are just preaching to the choir, the vast majority of users could care less, and thats what frankly Apple and Spotify are catering to, micro thin Jony Ive devices that are one micron wide and cost $1k, small album art is a distant secondary consideration.
There needs to be a fallacy I can simply name for this kind of thinking. In a world where you can't downgrade software 99% of the time, how do you show one of these companies that the change they made is shit and you don't like it? Go on Twitter and complain? "Buying power" is also an extremely crude signal. I might stop using Spotify for all kinds of reasons, like their shoddy revenue sharing. It's not like there are 100 competitors that are each nearly identical except for some specific element like album art size and I can choose the one that agrees with all my UX desires.
Edit:
It seems like a kind of UX paternalism has crept into the software industry. In the Winamp era it was possible to radically customize your music player (even making it massively ugly if you want). Over the years, more and more configuration options have been removed so now you get "dark mode" and that's basically it. Nearly all other options are chosen for you either by designer hubris or, more likely, the vendor's commercial priorities.
Boycott campaigns work, so don't know why it couldn't be applied here. Most folks don't care about album artwork though for this to ever be a thing, and I agree.
I used to buy cds and vinyl all the time bc of the packaging. If spotify totally did away with cover art I'd be annoyed, but enough to stop subscribing? Nah.
Another minor beef: Rounded corners for an album cover image don't make sense, either historically or aesthetically. Just give us the full image please, Apple.
At least it's static. Spotify keeps pushing music videos as cover art for singles and it's annoying as hell. If I wanted to see a video, I would've used other platforms.
Both Spotify and Apple Music make it really hard to see album art. It seems they just don't care about it. They show tiny thumbnails, and there's no way to make it bigger.
But it's not like artists care either. 99% of artist websites just have low resolution pictures as well.
I recently bought an LP, mainly for the album art, and when I unwrapped it at home I realised that they apparently sent 72 DPI files to the printer.
I just don't get it. They make all this elaborate artwork, and then they only let you see thumbnails.
I was listening to James Hetfield on the Joe Rogan Experience a few months back and he highlighted an experienced I completely forgot existed: buying albums solely based on album art.
I remember as a kid walking through the aisles of albums, floating around certain genres, and deciding on what to purchase purely because of an album cover. Band I had never heard of, well, look at that cover!
I still do this on Spotify. Scroll through the new releases and if a cover looks interesting, I give it a listen. Having grown up in record stores, I love that I can listen to anything instantly. It's pretty insane actually.
I might do this for the $1 vinyl/CD rack, but never in general. CDs were crazy expensive. We're talking $17.99 in the year 2000 and maybe $9.99 for the cassette.
I don't many kids that had money to drop on something based on the art alone. We needed money for magazines and concerts too y'know.
Good point. I didn't have that kind of money simply laying around, but I would sometimes save up and pay the $17.99. With that level of risk there was that much more reward, almost a form of gambling. It probably made my young brain give each song a lot more attention than I would have otherwise as I had to make sure I got my investment "back".
That is true. When I bought an album, I listened to it front and back. Gave several chances to songs that didn't connect with me the first time. Even though that was 20 years ago, I still remember the mediocre songs better than I remember some songs from the recent past that I actually liked.
If you want to appreciate the album art then purchase the LP. A tiny JPEG on AM or Spotify UI is never going to cut it for anybody who is interested in inspecting the cover art. These tools are designed for background listening
That‘s why I use the sleevenote app, which defaults to showing only the cover as large as possible. They even plan to build a square-screen music player :-D
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 288 ms ] threadThis isn't some generic "they don't care about the mac anymore" refrain, but I think there is a major sea change underway at the company. I think I will write soon about all of the hints, as I see them.
It's not really a great place to work.
I've noticed Apple does best PR wise when they do the latter, but it's hard for me to find examples of them doing that recently.
I would venture to say that 80% of that doesn't translate to an increase in revenue. How many people bought a 2019 Mac Pro because of the speaker inside of it?
They're slowly but steadily trimming this "waste". The products are becoming merely "great", but no longer insanely so. The age of Sane Apple, perhaps.
Apple seems to be significantly more focused on building revenue (especially from services) than on building the most insanely great things that can possibly exist (with revenue as a side effect).
Another example is the fact that they introduced an end-to-end encrypted messaging system that rapidly became a widespread standard... then backdoored it for the FBI (via the non-end-to-end-encrypted iCloud Backup). That isn't so much an indicator of Apple's new values... except that the KB article about what is and isn't e2e encrypted in iCloud is designed to deliberately confuse and mislead people into thinking the situation is better than it is. That's very un-Apple, if you ask me.
Apple used to be "the computer for the rest of us", the pirate-flag-flyers. Now they primarily make Facebook/Candy Crush client hardware.
This comment is obviously a massive oversimplification, and I want to write properly on it in detail and at length soon.
> And why can’t I see the album name anywhere on the UI? ↩
is also a problem. Apple is trying hard to destroy the concept of an "Album"
E.g. for Outkast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, I see tracks 1,2,3,6,8,9,10,12,13,15,17,19. Track 16 is on another album by "Outkast featuring Kelis."
I just want the tracks that are on the CD to show up together as the same album.
ID3v2.4 fixes many of the issues. But very few progs use it or default to 2.3. Plus the way an album can be sliced and diced for metadata is truly breathtaking.
Then add into that some of these programs try to use some form of acoustic id to try to find where it belongs. Which does what you are talking about. So you resort to setting the file read only so the program will not mess with the tags.
Then on top of that many of the online sources can be in bad shape for bands or releases. AC/DC is most certainly not alternative. But it is tagged that way in some databases. So data quality goes all the way from 'someone spent a lot of time getting this right' to 'someone uploaded whatever was in their mp3 library and called it a day'. Also even the data printed on the pages that came with it may have spelling errors and differences in spelling for individual tracks and artists. Some artists have 3-4 different aliases which one do you put it under without messing everything up or leave it stand alone and you forget you even had it.
Also differing releases is a pain too. Some albums have 40+ releases. Which one do you actually have. Does it really matter?
Once that expectation was betrayed, my collection's relationship with iTunes (now Apple Music) wholly changed. No longer could it be a slouching-toward-immaculate pet project of mine to maintain and grow and detail the music I love, because I could wake up the next day to Apple having literally replaced songs I myself had ripped and added to my library years ago, with these alternate, sometimes censored or even live versions. I can't easily hear the version of Bob's "No Woman No Cry" I grew up listening to and loving, because Apple replaced that with some studio version it guessed I had when tasked with playing the song at my request, 2+ computers and several years deep into trusting Apple with my collection.
Alternatively, as crooked-v mentioned, you can give all the tracks the same Album Artist. In your example, it sounds like “Outkast” should be the Album Artist for the whole album.
Why though? Honest question.
Even then they aren't picking albums or artists. They are served mixes from a bottomless carousel of user-created or algo-generated playlists. Most of the songs sound similar, as every playlist is designed to capture a specific mood. The artist becomes interchangeable. The album the track is from becomes meaningless. There's always something further down the playlist that sounds exactly like it.
Personally, I have always been an album listener; just go start to finish. Occasionally I'll throw on a playlist I made or something curated by the streaming service I am using, but it's rare for me.
Hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
Complacence/Apathy might be apt substitutions for stupidity in this case.
Unfortunately the alternatives are even worse.
I think this is becoming less and less true. I think Mac OS isn't as good as people say it is and Windows is better than people say it is. I can't speak either way to desktop Linux.
If that's accurate, that is a GOOD thing from a usability perspective.
Note that the Windows settings codebase is huge, has thousands of possible settings options that you can set, and the specific esoteric behavior of those settings is relied on by users, developers and sysadmins every day.
MS clearly decided to re-do the settings system over multiple Windows generations because it was too big to do in a single release cycle. During the transition period, both Settings and Control Panel tooling will be available, and used by many users. Is there any other alternative?
Windows 10 was released in 2015. It's been like this for six years. Things have improved incrementally over that time period, but there's just no excuse for this situation still existing. If you can't get it into one release cycle, the solution is not to release whatever half-baked thing you've finished and try to keep going with it, the solution is to wait until it's done. The current situation is strictly speaking worse than both replacing it altogether or not replacing it at all.
YMMV, but this approach is what causes software projects to balloon way beyond initial time requirements, and to be way out of date already when eventually released. If you're hacking on the train while it's running down the tracks, the only way to get there is small, frequent, incremental improvements; waiting until it's done will just result in it never releasing, or in the released version having tons of bugs.
This is why you need to determine what your MVP is and ship when the MVP is done, rigorously. In this case, either they chose the wrong MVP, or they shipped before reaching it. Thus the current situation is a result of indecision, not agile methods. Agile is not an excuse to ship half-baked software.
Here's how I would have managed this project, for what it's worth: if we determined that migrating fully in the allotted cycles was infeasible, I would have moved all of the settings we didn't have time to migrate from the Control Panel into a command-line tool or registry keys, gotten rid of Control Panel when I shipped Settings, and then incrementally added the ones we missed back into the new view. What infuriates me most about Windows are compromises like this, which are plainly a result of prioritizing existing user workflows over creating a consistent user experience.
(I wholeheartedly agree that Windows has been getting better in many respects, but the hostility of that experience felt really stark to me. Quit using Ubuntu for the same reason.)
Linux desktop is still a tinkertoy.
Linux on the desktop has been serving me very well for over 2 decades as my daily driver both at home and at work.
The M1 is the absolute best mobile processor on the market, soundly dominating what’s available from intel and it was just released. For mobile computing Apple is very far ahead. Could we have had something better? Maybe, but better than the best is a lot to ask and these advances came largely because of the iPad and iPhone. Without apples focus there, we wouldn’t have the M1 chip.
You also bring up chromebooks which are a google product and we’re predated by “netbooks” pushed by intel. From my perspective Apple is the only company of those 3 that has not resisted selling underperforming hardware. I don’t know of any chromebooks that perform as well as the iPad Air.
My OS is supposed to be a tool, and windows is super annoying unless you literally download Enterprise edition. Mac is okay, and I’ve been pretty pleased with how capable Linux Mint is, as long as things don’t randomly get broken (looking at you, package manager corrupting and acting weird for weeks before I finally googled and fixed it).
Windows works for people because they are used to its idiosyncrasies. You know how people think their browser icon is to open the internet? It's the same with Windows, to most it's what makes the computer, they don't know otherwise. And these idiosyncrasies are taught in schools and universities in computer classes. How to use a computer has become how to do stuff in Windows and MS Office. Brings back memories from my childhood when I was the "computer expert", helping my parents and their friends fix problems in old Windows 98 and XP. At least the old windows ui was somewhat consistent.
Take, for example, iOS 7 which came out 7 years ago. On the one hand it brought some sorely needed modernity, on the other, it replaced a well-polished, albeit dated, style. However, on its own UI-wise it was really bad. Subsequent releases have had tremendous improvements to its many faults while introducing others, and I can't see how that could be called "a steady decline."
This is seen in many areas outside software, so I would imagine it exists here as well.
[1]: Both age as in their physical age, as well as age as in a "have been users in this ecosystem longer" sense.
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
https://www.salon.com/1999/09/30/quicktime/
That being said, I understand that sometimes one needs to push boundaries of taste in order to make advances. I'm just sad that QuickTime Player had to be one of the sacrificial pikes upon which skeuomorphism died.
Now no one at Apple has that intuition.
Remember when you had to make software updates through iTunes? This was probably the worst piece of UX ever in a mainstream OS, even worse than clicking "Start" to shut down the computer in Windows. So quality steadily declining is not an accurate description.
I personally like Spotify's approach to evolving album art, where artists can use full-screen video clips or other visualizations (mostly taken from their music videos).
I too bought an iPod Touch back in 2008 because of how the player UI treated album art: as actual 'art', and deserving of a full-width display on the screen. I would meticulously tag my music library with the correct album art files precisely so that they would be displayed nicely on my portable player.
I think one reason the art got smaller is due to phone screens getting larger and higher-res. A full-width image spanning the iPhone SE would be 214 x 214 px. But on the iPhone 12 it would be 390 x 390px.
That would take up a lot of the screen's real estate, perhaps leaving less available for UI controls. Also, if digital album art tends to be low-res to begin with, it would look pixelated if displayed at full width on a high density pixel screen.
Digital album
https://i.imgur.com/AFvhdNB.png
(Except the "it becomes smaller when pausing" part, of course)
I'm not saying it's bad and IMO it's fine, just that I don't think it's really different from Apple music app.
However, it still feels very limited. They're all looping cinegraphs, they don't 'do' anything.
For an example of a genuinely imaginative liner notes experience, check out the floppy disk that came with Billy Idol's ambitious 1993 effort "Cyberpunk": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjl6As2lRGU
The app no longer cleanly and easily divides music into Songs/Artists/Albums/Playlists as top-level tabs, instead shunting them into menu items within one such tab. The older apps (pre-iOS 7?) even let the user customize which top-level tabs they wanted to see (e.g. Composer).
Again, I bet a lot of this pain would go away if I started using Apple Music, but I'm bothered by a loss in UX.
However, my problem was (was it in iOS 9?) when they moved Downloaded from a permanently set toggle switch to a folder you selected. Which brought you to the exact same view as Library but with only the music on your device. And if you leave the app you may or may not end up in that same view when you return. It made more sense as a setting that you had to deliberately set or unset, not as a "view" of your content where the default was to use more bandwidth and play things you'd deliberately deleted.
Nope, I just finished a 3 month trial and it never got any easier. There is no way the person in charge of this app actually uses it day to day (or maybe they've just never used Spotify?)
My biggest grievances:
- Wouldn't be ready to play what I was last listening to immediately, esp if data service was low (Spotify seems always ready to go, even if I haven't explicitly downloaded a song to cache)
- Awful recommendations -- Kept playing songs from the first Tyler, the Creator album when I was listening to vapor/synthwave radio (I like that album but they do not go together!)
I've tried Apple Music and Deezer and both just suck at keeping moods. Apple will go from calm piano to noisy experimental hip hop within 2 or 3 tracks.
Spotify recommendations, while still flawed (really every recommendation algorithm should let a user tune some parameters based on mood, like how much new stuff should be included), are by far the best I've heard.
In other ways they are completely outclassed by Spotify, but their mood-respecting recommendations are the best I've seen by far.
Pre iOS7 was done under a person who understands and is passionate about Music. Steve Jobs.
iOS 7 was the first major UI redesign Apple had with iOS, all lead by Jony Ive. Going from Hardware Industrial Design to everything "Design". Throwing out everything that Apple UX, UI, HID had over the years. Basically Jony Ive hated Skeuomorphic design ( Previously Lead by Scott Forstall ) so much he throw everything out. Not sure if he just hated Scott or the design. Or possibly both. But it took Apple years to finally walk back on all those decisions. ( The same to Apple Store, but that is another story )
Apple Music was initially just Beats. The whole App design was about that stupid "Next Song" they keep promoting, also from Beats. It was Jimmy Iovine's idea that the computer / iPhone would magically know your mood and play the next song. And somehow Eddy Cue was sold into it. If you ignore the marketing crap, what Jimmy Iovine wanted was for people to discover new music. By either using AI, curated playlist or Apple Radio. For a long time Apple Music doesn't even have repeat the same song button. And the whole UI was designed for you to "discover" music. As a true music nerd this may have been OK, for normally user this is just stuffing random piece of music in front of their face. It wasn't until a few years later they finally accepted defeat and accept the fact the users knows what they want to listen. And what song or artist they are looking for, as well as repeating the same god damn song hundreds of time.
That is how we arrived at today's Apple Music UX. Which might have been OK for any other company and consumer / user. But in my view, still a bloody pile of crap. Instead they are so focused on the social justice aspect and keep telling the media how Apple's paid out to music labels are 10% higher than Spotify. And continue to push Free Trial hoping to push for higher services revenue.
What I do care about is a current "About" tab in Spotify, a WikiPedia page, or maybe a well-maintained webpage for/by the artist.
Not meant to be an indictment of visual art of this type, just suggesting that perhaps the "vector" needs to shift elsewhere.
Good example is the backgrounds created by Cryo Chamber for their YT postings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbKDlzQgIwc
Maybe cover art is less meaningful *to you*. FTFY. To the author it is meaningful.
Today UX/UI teams are making decisions for everyone and not allowing anyone to deviate from those decisions. Less and less apps offer users a choice via a settings UI. To me the fix is simple allow users to customize their UI.
The author admits they're in a niche:
> The fact of the matter is that nobody cares about cover art.
So they're aware that really most people don't really care any more. Like most people these days I listen to music for the music, not the physical media artwork.
Unless you are on the Apple Music team and have access to some study how would you know that?
Common sense? Even the author who's passionate about album art has to admit it's a dead art and people don't care.
Most people care about the music nowadays, not how it's packaged. I think that's a good thing.
It's not like he can customize the UI in the 2012 version of Music app. He just by chance liked it like that.
Cover art is no longer useful for music discovery or intriguing fans when an album "drops". Those were UX/UI things last ... century. Now they aren't. They're vestigial embellishments at best.
But on the topic of Apple, I would say its just not that deep. Their UI/UX is factoring in the relevance of certain things, while also using some of the image metadata that all their audio files have associated with them. The graphics team factored in an ongoing music collector culture and their own preference and the medium its being played on (the phone and app system). It wouldn't be surprising if a future update did have basically a simple list, with a drilled-in view of what's playing, similar to most other music discovery apps.
Unless you have proof this is moot.
Would you prefer if replaced "no longer useful" with "has diminished significance such that it is ultimately vestigial"?
In my world it is plainly obvious that music discovery occurs from algorithmic introductions, which are counted, and the song being played which is also captured by audio listening apps which is also counted.
In the past, cover art would have been an advertisement for an album that contained songs which weren't out yet, and also useful when browsing physical albums in a store. Both of which is pretty much not happening at all, I mean feel free to correct me if your world still has that. I remember people used to complain about all the other songs on albums not being as interesting as the one song they wanted, the people are the market and the market chose something else which evolved to a completely different form of music discovery.
I don't have a paper on that. Is it really moot if this is a shared experience? I think there are a lot of people that are just uncomfortable that the world changed and they never stopped to notice, and without a counterpoint thats how you sound to me. But if that's not the case, I'm totally open to a conversation as I don't have strong opinions on the matter and am also totally content with music discovery today, which doesn't emphasize cover art for easily understandable reasons, to me.
That's not really relevant. The author might find any random thing meaningful, including keeping an ant farm at home.
The point is whether it's meaningful enough to many people, justifying the claim that Apple should have given it some special prominence.
This might be too broad of a generalization. I find a lot of cover art quite interesting, and I hope it remains prominent. I think a (dis)like for cover art might just be a personal preference.
When I listen to music on Spotify or whatever, I do still pay attention to the cover art and spend a moment to just admire it if it catches my eye.
In an abstract sense, the association of visual art with music, is, of course, a good thing that I'm sure is here to stay.
UPDATED TO ADD: Perhaps the abstract concept of "album" is what needs to go the way of the dodo.
Whether artists have enough material to justify an album-length release is a different topic.
However, there are nonetheless lots of people like myself that primarily listen to albums, maintain their own digital libraries, and use streaming platforms as a glorified "trial" platform for new music. I find those who tend to listen to music like I do really care about high resolution album art (and by extension the quality and accuracy of track metadata).
Frankly, since both needs are so widely different, I'm not sure there's any one solution for both. Goodness knows Apple Music tries, but to OP's point, it's clearly not succeeding in this effort.
> use streaming platforms as a glorified "trial" platform for new music
... and it seems like the skeumorphism has changed from being a digital analog of a personal record library, to being of a record store. The "library" aspect of it has become more like just the featured section of the store.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26652389
It will be amazing how much information there is and to learn about the thought process of the artist while creating the album.
I think the last CD I bought was in 2005, and there was a 7 year gap before I bought my first vinyl. I had completely forgotten that albums used to come with lyrics, trivia and pictures of the band.
Do you listen to full albums or just mixes/random?
I see it much less important for the latter but significant for the former. For a lot of the albums I listen the cover art complements the music/message of the album. I really like it and it enhances my music listening experience.
At the launch of the iphone, everything was skeumorphic. The cover flow clearly emulated flipping through a stack of records or CD books.
Now that people don't have physical media, the metaphor changes. The new design treats the cover art like an avatar on a forum or social media site -- a small thumbnail to identify the music.
Additionally, the original iPod/iPhone typically used internal storage in your Library. Under the Apple Music era of streaming, this may be a decision to shave a few % off of bandwidth costs by only pushing lower-resolution images. And then the choice being made to not upscale low-res to screen-width and incur blurriness.
I happen to enjoy both and treat them as different experiences. I'm fine if the expectations around digital change as long as it's still accessible.
[0] http://www.paperandplastick.com/
"Vinyl records accounted for $232.1 million of music sales in the first half of the year, compared to CDs, which brought in only $129.9 million. ... Since 2005, sales for vinyl have grown consecutively. In the first half of 2020, vinyl revenue was up 4%, while CD revenue was down 48%, according to the RIAA."
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/13/tech/vinyl-records-cd-sales-r...
... those are _different_ markets:
- Streaming is about subscription to a right to listen to music passing by, attached to a specific set of account (with all the metrics that come with it).
- Vinyl is about physical analog copies that you can transmit to someone across space and time and that are barely trackable.
Edit: but indeed, huge markets crush small ones...
I see the appeal of having a physical token that I can transmit to people, but it's not enough to make me buy CDs any longer.
But, like books, that's the only way my kids and their kids may keep the actual artefact of something that I did read or listen to (be it a book, or a vinyl).
So, if I appreaciate/care about what it is/says, I get a physical copy of it so I can give it to someone. Otherwise I know it's lost to them.
That said, I finally got my music library cleaned up and decided to fill in some holes. But, at that point, I also decided I might as well just use subscription downloads from Apple Music. It's all very mainstream older stuff and if I do decide at some point, I want copies I own I can buy them if I want. But no need to spend the money right now just so I know I own everything.
My Spotify history is full of songs and playlists which I don't even like, and I use it to explore other genres and artists. It's reasonable that only 5% of everyday people listen to is good enough to be acquired permanently.
Every single item in the digital world down to a pixel (off of the `pt` points system) we see online is skeuomorphic inspiration off of something! Typesetting and the alphabet is skeuo off the typewriter systems/foundry, buttons––of course skeuomorphism, web-page and scrolling follow from pulp and physical scrolls, header, footer, body inspire off of letterheads.
Anyone who claims 'skeuomorphism this, but !skeuomorphism that' is a digital noob and doesn't quite understand where the world has been and how it got here.
The difference may be subject to nuance and debate, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
You're deluding yourself.
Absolute dynamo of a medium.
It also cleverly makes albums take up a small amount of space while being identifiable. iPhone Safari tabs are similar.
Anecdotally, I have a friend who collects rare underground CDs from the mid-2000's because vinyl hadn't been revived yet and digital streaming wasn't big yet, so some bands who were only active during that time only ever put out CDs. And personally I have a few dozen vinyl albums that came out in the last 10 years.
With the vinyl revival, I expect album art will still continue to be important to niche music collectors, and any artist who releases in full-album format (many artists just do singles now, so that won't apply to them I'm sure).
> A standard 12-inch 33 RPM vinyl record can have a playtime of roughly 22 minutes per side for a total of 44 minutes. A 7-inch 45 RPM record can fit approximately 5 minutes per side for a total of 10 minutes. Generally, any longer, the sound quality would start to deteriorate.
https://peakvinyl.com/record-playtimes/
With new releases the vinyl is usually an afterthought, so it usually doesn't fit nicely on two sides, so they just throw an extra disc in the sleeve and spread the songs evenly and you end up with 3 or 4 sides with 12-15 min music on them.
Any recommendations?
Closed source: foobar2000
I would offer it's a generational thing. If you came from vinyl or early CD, with books with lyrics and recognisable artworks you've just got expectations or wishes that aren't being fulfilled anymore. No value judgement, I get that young people discover music wholly differently. There's survivorship bias in there as well, but I know the labels, recordings and albums I want my song or aria to be from by picture. And I'll probably listen to those specific albums and recordings until I pass, so 50 more years of caring for specific album art here.
Folks complaining about Apple and art are just preaching to the choir, the vast majority of users could care less, and thats what frankly Apple and Spotify are catering to, micro thin Jony Ive devices that are one micron wide and cost $1k, small album art is a distant secondary consideration.
Edit: It seems like a kind of UX paternalism has crept into the software industry. In the Winamp era it was possible to radically customize your music player (even making it massively ugly if you want). Over the years, more and more configuration options have been removed so now you get "dark mode" and that's basically it. Nearly all other options are chosen for you either by designer hubris or, more likely, the vendor's commercial priorities.
I used to buy cds and vinyl all the time bc of the packaging. If spotify totally did away with cover art I'd be annoyed, but enough to stop subscribing? Nah.
But it's not like artists care either. 99% of artist websites just have low resolution pictures as well.
I recently bought an LP, mainly for the album art, and when I unwrapped it at home I realised that they apparently sent 72 DPI files to the printer.
I just don't get it. They make all this elaborate artwork, and then they only let you see thumbnails.
Personally, I wouldn't use a music player to view album art.
I remember as a kid walking through the aisles of albums, floating around certain genres, and deciding on what to purchase purely because of an album cover. Band I had never heard of, well, look at that cover!
I don't many kids that had money to drop on something based on the art alone. We needed money for magazines and concerts too y'know.