If you are anything like me, one of the biggest things you miss about the transition to electronic distribution and management of music is missing out on album artwork. I still have CD cases and covers that I like to take out and look at once in a while. There is something to be said about the artwork that a band or an artist chooses to accompany their music. It somehow spoke to them and they wanted to share it with their fans. In the past, you linked those images and how they made you feel to the music you were experiencing. Would Kid A have had the same otherworldly feel without the landscapes and illustrations of Stanley Donwood? The artwork and images are there to help the music wash over you and give you something to get lost in visually while you are assaulted musically.

While iTunes has done a good job including digital covers and even booklets with some recent albums like Beck’s Guerolito, most older albums miss out on this treatment. Mac users have the option of using Fetch Art or one of the many excellent applescripts available at Doug’s Applescripts to grab album art and assign it to their music. But PC users have thus far been left to fend for themselves if they want to seek out artwork for the albums that they have either ripped from CDs or compiled back in the early days of music downloading. While automation may still be out of reach, I have found a great resource for album covers. The aptly named Coverdude.com offers hi-res images of nearly every album that I have searched for thus far, even relatively obscure artists. The site is very basic and not much to look at but it makes up for it by offering three sizes of each album cover and quick searches. Get back the visual element you lost during music’s evolution. It’s time to see what they want you to hear.

The Apple iTunes Music Store has now sold over 950 million songs in 21 countries. To celebrate, they are running a promotion during the countdown to the billion songs sold milestone. Every 100,000th song downloaded wins a black 4GB iPod nano and a $100 iTunes Music Card. The grand prize for nabbing the billionth song is a new 20-inch iMac, 10 (count ‘em) 10 60GB iPods (5 white/5 black) and 1 U.S. $10,000 iTunes Music Card. On top of that, Apple will create a full-ride scholarship in your name to a world-renowned music school. Not bad eh?

It’s hard to imagine that less than 5 years ago, the only reliable way to get music electronically was to dowload it using services like Napster, Audio Galaxy and Morpheus. Then you had to clean up the titles of each track, filter out the bogus ones, and get rid of any that cut off early or had skips in them. Now here we are in 2006 with a fully featured and mature digital music and video store that has sold nearly a billion songs. Say what you will about the walled-garden approach of only loading songs onto iPods, I don’t see any other service offering this kind of digital entertainment quality.