Digital Music Packaging Getting Jazzed Up in '08

Part of the reasons CDs are still popular in the age of digital music is the extras, Reuters reports. When you buy a CD, you get extended album art, lyrics, and liner notes. With an album downloaded digitally, it's just song titles and thumbnail art. The industry hopes to change that in 2008, and Apple's iTunes is expected to lead the way.

One goal for the big music labels is to shift consumer focus to buying whole albums rather than just individual tracks. The hope is to get music fans to start wanting more from their downloads, so expect to see digital elaborations on the "extras" the physical copies have long carried, including attached lyrics files, multimedia album art, and even "making of" features in place of the tried-and-true liner notes.  (More digital music stories.)