When physical media was king in the world of music, we needed to read our albums as well as listen to them.
With the CD, vinyl or cassette playing, we’d pore over the liner notes to learn as much as we could about the songs, the creators, the studios, and all the personnel responsible for getting us this slab of plastic. We also studied the lyrics for insight, hidden meanings and chunks of information we may have missed just by listening. Liner notes were considered so important that the Grammys created a category for the art form in 1964. (The category still exists, by the way.)
But liner notes have not always been a thing. This was an idea that emerged in the early 20th century at the very beginning of the recorded music industry. When the old, original 10-inch 78 RPM rotating discs were sold individually, they came in paper sleeves with no adornment whatsoever. But when they were sold together in a collection, say, a symphony that had to be broken up across a dozen discs because of the four-minute capacity of a 78, that package was called a phonograph album, the audio equivalent of a photo album.
To help with the sale of these expensive packages, sheets of text were included along with the records. This followed in the tradition of printed programs that were a staple of live performances of symphonies, operas, ballets and the like. They were notes on what the audience was about to see and hear.
In those early days, record album text tended to feature rather basic information. Sometimes, though, someone would write an essay about the recordings, the recording session, the performance, the composer, and so on. More often, though, the inner sleeves featured ads for other albums offered by the label. Such material was known as “sleeve notes.”
When Columbia introduced the 33 1/3 PM long-playing vinyl album in 1948, the 12 x 12 packaging was real estate that couldn’t be ignored.
Since the first LPs were the domain of highbrow material such as classical music, jazz, movie soundtracks and Broadway cast recordings, labels knew that their customers wanted as much information as possible about what they’d just purchased. Musicologists, music journalists and the occasional label executive were often commissioned to write essays related to the recording. And because LPs moved us away from individual records in sleeves bound together in book-like things to a single record in a simple package, the term “liner notes” started to enter the lexicon.
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Fast-forward to the 1960s. As music became more of a vehicle for social change, it became important to print lyrics on the liner notes. Editorials from the artist or someone close to them might be included. Combined with the rise in sophistication of album artwork (a story unto itself), the visual aspects of an album assumed new importance.
By the 1970s, probably the golden age of liner notes at least as far as vinyl was concerned, studying the text and photos that came with an album was often everything we could learn about the artist and the music in those pre-internet, pre-video-channels days. It was how we learned the names of producers, recording studios, session players, musical instrument manufacturers, and so much more.
Things could be a little tricky when it came to cassettes. The J-card, that piece of cardboard that fit inside the case, was considered so useless that one side was often left blank. Eventually, though, some albums came with J-cards with liner notes, although the six-point font was sometimes impossible to read without a magnifying glass.
The same happened with the first CDs. Discs came with a 10 x 5 glossy piece of paper that, when opened up, revealed nothing but a blank side. But CDs, too, got on board and, before long, discs began coming with elaborate booklets that, in some cases, contained more information than came with the vinyl edition. Each song might be annotated with extra detail. Printing lyrics became more common. Including studio details was de rigeur. The number of essays and editorials declined, but they found a new home with the rise of expansive and expensive box sets.
Such has been the case ever since. I’ve been hired to write liner notes for many different releases, including more than a dozen retro compilations, a 25th anniversary reissue of The Tragically Hip’s Fully Completely and, unwittingly, an early CD version of Weezer’s “red” album. (The label transcribed an interview I did with the band without telling — or paying — me, but whatever.)
In the digital age, though, liner notes still exist — at least not in their traditional form. Yes, there are notes and the metadata that come with digital tracks, but it’s not the same as holding something in your hands as you leisurely look for clues and enlightenment.
But liner notes haven’t gone away. Instead, the concept has fragmented and migrated in different directions. Because there’s no “container” for liner notes, they’ve found other ways to exist. We need to keep track of songs, lyrics and all the people who worked on that material. People need official credit so they can be recognized for their work.
In the late 2000s, Apple’s iTunes Store embarked on a project code-named “Cocktail” that manifested as a type of interactive artwork that could be identified by the file extension, .itlp and began with the digital album version of U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Sadly, the project ended in 2018.
In 2013, Rhapsody, now rebranded as Napster, started including liner notes in its metadata, designed to draw from something called the Global Repertoire Database, but little has come from that. Spotify launched Songwriter Pages in 2020, calling it “a new way for fans, collaborators, and industry partners to dive deeper into the creators behind their favourite music.”
Today, Apple Music offer View Credits. Just tap the three dots next to a song and you’ll get extra information about it. If you buy an album through the iTunes Music Store, there’s sometimes a blurb written by the platform’s editorial team. And if you subscribe to Apple Music Classical, there are digital booklets, listening guides and liner notes that are synced to the music. Spotify has Song Credits, Song DNA and About the Song features. You might even find Playlist Notes, which is commentary written by Spotify’s editorial people. And if all else fails, there’s User Notes where you add short bits of text to individual tracks inside playlists.
If you don’t mind going a little further afield, Discogs.com offers an incredibly rich amount of information that was once reserved for LPs and CDs. Bandcamp also encourages artists to add information to their pages. And if push comes to shove, an album’s Wikipedia page can be pretty good when it comes to information and credits.
But the real home for liner notes is box sets, carefully curated collections of CDs, vinyl, DVD and Blu-ray — sometimes all at once. One of the things you pay for is lavishly designed books, often hardcover, filled with information, editorial and essays. And if box sets are above your price range, virtually every vinyl record issued today has gone back to the way things used to be.
Liner notes aren’t dead in this digital world. Far from it. You just have to know where to look.
