[mmglr]

> 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.

[coldtea]

>Maybe cover art is less meaningful to you. FTFY. To the author it is meaningful.

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.

[vmception]

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.

[AlexandrB]

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.

[vmception]

Spotify has what you are looking for.

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.

[mmglr]

> 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.

Unless you have proof this is moot.

[vmception]

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.

[chrisseaton]

> 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.

[mmglr]

> So they're aware that really most people don't really care any more.

Unless you are on the Apple Music team and have access to some study how would you know that?

[chrisseaton]

> 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.

[fireattack]

Your point makes no sense. Yesterday's UX teams were making decisions for you too.

It's not like he can customize the UI in the 2012 version of Music app. He just by chance liked it like that.

[mmglr]

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.

[fireattack]

Fair point