The album booklet is pretty irrelevant.
It's not dead yet. You can still find one tucked into a CD or slid inside a vinyl gatefold. But most new music reaches people through an app that gives you a cover the size of a thumbnail and not much else.
So someone needs to save it >> someone needs to create the future of music album booklets and liner notes. This seemed like a good project for us.
The booklet was the only part of an album made for reading. It held lyrics, credits, photos, thank-you lists, and the occasional essay from someone who cared too much. It told you who played bass on track six and whose couch the record was written on.
Streaming didn't bring any of that along. Not for lack of trying, though.
In 2009 Apple launched iTunes LP, an interactive booklet that lived inside iTunes: lyrics, liner notes, band photos, performance videos. The major labels were building a rival format of their own at the same time. It never caught on, and Apple stopped accepting new ones in 2018.
The plain digital booklet did worse. That was a PDF tucked into your download that almost nobody opened. The Outline was calling it a failed experiment back in 2017.
Spotify has taken at least three swings. Behind the Lyrics ran pop-up cards from Genius while the song played, until Paramore's Hayley Williams publicly called out the outdated facts it was showing about her own music. In 2019 came Storyline, swipeable cards written by the artists themselves, which never got much past a test. Behind the Lyrics was eventually retired to make room for plain lyrics. This year it's About the Song: swipeable cards summarized from third-party sources.
So the newest version of the album booklet is a summary of what other people wrote about the album :/
Every one of these has the same problem. The booklet lives on the same screen as the next song and the next notification, and reading loses that fight every time. Features also get switched off in app updates. Nobody has ever had a booklet pulled off their shelf by a product team.
The cover made it. The booklet didn't.
Oddly enough, album covers are doing fine.
Vinyl grew for the 19th straight year in 2025 and passed $1 billion in US sales for the first time since 1983. Even the RIAA's chief described the format as collectable art.
Covers made the jump to streaming better than anyone expected, too. You see them constantly: on your lock screen while a song plays, in search results, stacked in the grid of your library, glowing on the car dashboard. On a screen the cover became the button. It's how you find the album.
The booklet never got a job like that. It asks you to stop and read, and a screen is built to keep you moving.
Introducing Radioposter Album Booklets
So how do we save it? How do we make it relevant again? We give the paper booklet and its ink, sound. Radioposter's paper-fi technology can be applied to album booklets and artists can turn them into mini docs (with demo cuts, narration, extra skits, interviews, etc.) or whatever artistic expression they can dream up with this extra superpower to tell their story. Static image and sound can work together in the analog world to complement the tracklist.