I believe that in today's market you need to sell something more than 'just an album,' because MP3 players and downloading are changing everything. Buying CDs at the store almost seems old fashioned. If you do not own an iPod then you are an iDud.

The music industry is now promoting new album releases in two ways. The first is offering songs for download directly. The second is by offering more content to accompany the album. Think of it like bonus features on a DVD. Some CDs you can buy now offer video, pictures and other interactive features. You can even find CD/DVD combo packs for about the same price as traditional albums.

Given the market, I think in order for full album sales to keep up with .99 cent singles, musicians have to offer much more than music. You have to offer an experience. We live in an information age and people want to know more about the artists to whom they listen. The Internet makes it easy to distribute content, but high quality content is still best distributed through physical media formats like CDs and DVDs.

There are still some people who love going to the store and having a physical copy of an album that they can hold in their hands. These types of people love liner notes and good album artwork. They take pride in the packaging because it is another aspect of the band that they can appreciate. Artwork means many things to many people. Most of us probably see it as a snapshot of the artist at that particular time in their career. It's nice to be able to line up an artist's entire catalog side by side and see how they progressed over the years.

You too, should take pride in your artwork and liner notes. Observe how your music evolves and takes shape in the studio. Start to visualize how you could possibly represent it visually to others. It might not be easy and it will probably require some abstract thinking. If you are a solo artist like me, then you would probably just stick a photo of your face on the cover and call it a day. I chose to be a little less "in your face" about it.

I asked Enoch Chan, an artist and photographer, to take some photos one cloudy and dreary day during Christmas 2005. Here is what he captured.

The photo is great compositionally, although it does not really have the 'pop' an album cover should have to get someone else's attention. This is by no fault of the photographer however. I know Enoch knows his stuff. Just take a look at the other photos through the album and on the DVD. He did the best he possibly could, given the conditions of the day.

If you do not know how to use photo-editing software then find someone who does. I would have loved to use an unedited piece of photography, but unfortunately this wasn't album cover worthy in this state. It needed a little work. I separated all of the elements of the photo I wanted to modify so I could adjust their properties independent of one another. I first started with the grass, trees and blue jeans.

Then the sky.

Then lighting effects.

Think about the most appropriate font to use to accompany what you see in the photo. As we can see there are lots of branches and twigs. The final version of the album cover is slightly different than what you see above, but observe how the font style fits nicely with the photo.

Observe how the following does not.

As you can see, photo editing goes a long way. Do yourself a favor and really think about what your album cover will look like. Do not put your pet dog in sunglasses while holding your guitar on your cover. Yes, I've seen it done and it's pathetic. No one will take you seriously no matter how awesome your music is. The first step in getting people to take you seriously is to take yourself seriously.

A great supplement to your music is video. Fans like to see their favorite artists perform live. They also like to see behind the scenes stuff too. The only acronym cooler than 'CD' is 'DVD'. DVDs filled with video content go a long way in promoting your material.

Click the following link for a music video. This is one of the many music videos included on the Visuals to the Aural Medium, the DVD accompaniment for The History of Recorded Music.

"The Spirits of Tomorrow" music video - 15.6 MB .wmv
Taken from Brian Dobbs' The History of Recorded Music, copyright 2006.

If you choose to do some extra work and prepare video content for your album, make sure you are up to speed with current production trends. Widescreen 16 x 9 TV sets are dominating the market and soon every household will have one. Shoot your video with a camera capable of shooting native 16 x 9, not letterboxed 4 x 3. There is a difference. Some consumer grade miniDV cameras have 16 x 9 widescreen capability, which gives you an extra 33% of vertical resolution. Trust me, it is important so shoot for the future. Just like black and white television is obsolete, standard 4 x 3 TVs will soon be.

Invest in a camera and tripod too, because no one likes shaky video. If you do hold your camera make sure you turn on the image stabilization feature, which will reduce the amount of shake. Record studio footage and your live performances. You want to give your fans something to chew on after they have listened to your music. Once you have compiled enough footage, edit it together and author a custom DVD to accompany the album. Maintain artistic consistency so your fans can see a direct connection between the album and the supplementary DVD.

Do yourself a favor and invest in a DVD-Audio player. DVD-Audio has the capability of delivering high-resolution multichannel audio through your home theater system. If you don't have a home theater, go spend $300 for a home theater in a box system. If you are still listening to music and watching movies only in stereo then you are missing out.

As for music, DVD-Audio, Super Audio CD and DualDisc releases have been trickling their way into the shelves at CD stores. The average consumer knows close to nothing of these formats. The average salesperson doesn't know much either. Take it upon yourself to research these formats because they will be the popular music formats of the future. Once people start realizing that .mp3s sound like dookie they will want more from their listening experience. That is where surround sound music comes into play.

How do you get surround sound for your album? Get a record deal, get famous and then start calling shots. If that does not work for you, then you can come up with your own way of doing things, like I did. I came up with the idea of using the levels of the stereo mix but separating the tracks into six speakers instead of two. I found DVD-Audio software that allowed the user to import six .wav files corresponding to the Left, Center, Right, Left Surround, Right Surround and LFE tracks of the software.

Knowing this, I knew I had to somehow come up with these six .wav files using extremely unconventional methods. The luxury you have in a recording studio during the mixing process allows you to turn a knob to determine which speaker the track will output to. The recording studio I used did not have multichannel mixing capability so I thought of another way of basically achieving the same thing.

In the recording studio, export all of the tracks for one song into separate .wav files. You now have isolated each instrument from one another, as well as each stereo pair. The next step is to come up with a chart to map out how you will 'mix' these files with each other to come up with one of the six channels in multichannel music. Keep in mind that if you have a stereo pair of an acoustic guitar, you must mix the "Acoustic Guitar Left" to the "Left" channel .wav file. Another example would be drum overheads left and right. Below is a simple chart for your reference. Each row represents an instrument or track, and each column ultimately represents one of the six .wav files needed for the DVD-Audio burning software.

Go column by column and mix the files together while maintaining bit rates and sampling frequencies across the board. For example, using this chart you will eventually create a Left Surround channel that contains the left channel of any reverb effects, the left channel of the keyboard stereo pair and the left channel of any flange effects. Keep in mind this is an extremely simple chart. One of my songs had 80 tracks to sort through!