Bandcamp and the cover art question is something I've been thinking about since someone pointed out that my purchasing behavior is heavily influenced by visual presentation.

I am absolutely a cover-art-first buyer in a way I was never fully conscious of before someone showed me my own collection statistics. Records with striking, unusual, or carefully considered artwork are heavily overrepresented in my purchases relative to records with generic or careless covers.

The question is whether this is a good heuristic. On one hand, artists who take the visual presentation seriously enough to make something interesting often take the music seriously in the same way. On the other hand, there are records with stunning covers that sound like the cover was the main creative act.

I've started trying to be more conscious about whether I'm responding to the record or the object. But I haven't been able to completely separate them, and I'm not sure I want to.