I'm a lifelong music fan. I've been obsessed by both music itself and the design of music packaging since my dad first took me to the record shop when I was four years old. Whenever I got a new record, tape or CD, the first thing I would do (after putting it on the stereo) was tease the sleeve out of the cover and unfold.



Now I'm grown up and a graphic designer, I still buy music but the packaging is gone. I go to iTunes, find the music I want to buy, and hit the magic button. I get the audio files and a cover image, but the magic of the sleeve has gone. No more are the mysterious fold-out photographic spreads, cryptic illustrations and intriguing liner notes (who is Frankie the Horse?).

So the question is: when digital music becomes the norm, what will happen to the record cover?

A couple of years ago I put this question to Tony Wilson at a Q&A session. Music fans and graphic geeks alike will know that Tony commissioned some of the finest record sleeves ever created. With Wilson's Factory Records as client, Peter Saville produced a slew of brilliant designs for New Order and Joy Division. His response was that it was no longer relevant. This disappointed me at the time. I was annoyed by the way he so quickly dismissed the works of art which had been so important to me and other young designers. Now I can see his point.

Vinyl records were fragile so they needed packaging to protect them. The packaging employed for products of all kinds, from tobacco to toilet roll, have long been embellished in order to help them stand out from their competitors on the shelves. This naturally happened to the packaging used for records, and later for cassettes and CDs. Ever since the 1960s when rock and pop music exploded into youth culture, serious music fans could be pretty sure that their favourite band's new album would come in a pretty sweet package.

Digital music doesn't need to be protected from scratches or dust, and it doesn't compete for your attention on a shelf with a hundred other releases, so it doesn't need a package. Sure, iTunes and programs like it make an effort to show you a jpeg of the physical album cover, but this is a really just a stop-gap solution. With the mainstream adoption of digital music the album cover as we know it will cease to exist.

If you believe this, and you're anything like me you'll already be showing signs of stress and discomfort; but there's no need to retire to the shed with your precious gate-fold Led Zeppelin LPs just yet. Just because the record cover's days are numbered doesn't mean that graphic design for music is dead. In the new world of digital music, standing out from their peers is more important to musicians than ever. Having better design and art direction for their websites / widgets / blogs / adverts etc. will help labels, bands and artists do just that.