Almost every week without fail you can read somewhere about how the end of the CD is nigh. Digital downloads of MP3s are no longer the way of the future; they are now. All those cumbersome CD players are now being replaced by teeny little iPod clones that can hold hundreds, if not thousands, more songs than one 700MB CD-R ever could. At one time, the downloading of music from the Internet was the province of hackers and considered an illegal activity. Now every major record company is in on the act and new releases are routinely available to download from iTunes long before they come available in hard copy.
Of course this saves them tons of money, as there's no longer the need to create physical packaging. If an item is being downloaded, what purpose is served by spending a small bundle on cover art or liner notes? Simply post the stuff to a web page once and be done with it. Well, maybe I'm old fashioned, but one of the things that I still miss most about LPs (long-playing records, for those folks under 30 who don't remember what came before CDs) is the great album art. CDs are such dinky little things that what you get is a postage stamp compared to the huge expanse of color that once covered LPs. Still, at least CDs offer something you can hold onto while listening to your music — some tangible proof that somebody, somewhere, went to some effort to produce it.
It turns out that I'm not as alone or weird as I'd thought I was as the independent Norwegian label Rune Grammofon is proving with the release of Money Will Ruin Everything: The Second Edition on February 3. Gathered together on two discs, a poster, and an accompanying book, it's their second package celebrating the various performers signed to their label. The two CDs contain samples from assorted groups and individuals who they've recorded; and the book is chock full of interviews, articles, photos, album art, and other mementos related to the past five years of the label's history.
To be honest, I'd never heard of the label until I received the press release from their North American distributor, Forced Exposure, and had no idea what kind of music they produced. What attracted me was the fact that this little label had the balls to produce this type of package when nearly everyone else is going in the opposite direction as quickly as possible. I had to know more about what this label produced that they would go to this much effort to celebrate their performers and who are the people responsible for making it happen.
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