Will Deluxe Album Art Save CDs?

Way back when, albums were big ol’ cardboard squares of interactive art you could play with while listening to the music in the album. Never heard of it? Don’t worry, that’s only because stuffs like these never took place here in Malaysia.

You could peel an Andy Warhol banana slowly and see, from The Velvet Underground & Nico album cover, or tug down Mick Jagger’s Sticky zipper from The Rolling Stones album cover like millions of groupies before. Sounds like heaps of fun (??) I wouldn’t know, really. Well, that definitely signifies like coolness to me. I remembered all I ever got from purchasing an album, was a stinking poster or a lousy pocket calendar; go figure. None of this interactive fun stuff.

Well all those stuff made spending money for an album, good and worth all the money. These days, some artists are trying to relive those magical days, such as: Beck with The Information (stickers enable purchasers to conceive the cover), Bright Eyes with Cassadaga (hidden images abound), and Arcade Fire with Neon Bible (featuring flipbooks and a lenticular cover). Lenticular cover??

Some of it would, even could increase album sales again. But to think again, wouldn’t all this interactive art stuff increase the cost of producing an album, hence increasing the price of an album overall? What makes them think that we’d pay twice as much as compared to not having to pay at all?