Zune Thoughts: Why Does Zune Marketplace Album Art Suck so Much?

I really like album art. I'm a visual person, so I like looking at album covers. Quite often when I see the album cover I remember the music on it. I was looking at some songs in the Zune Marketplace that I had bought, and the album art is completely pathetic and unimpressive. Check this out:



Gee. 240 x 240 pixels and badly over-compressed (UPDATE: it's only 150 x 150 pixels, no wonder it looks so bad on the Zune, it has to scale up from 150 x 150 by 240 x 240). That looks incredibly ugly when I'm listening to music via Windows Media Center and that image is shown on a 26" LCD TV. Nasty. When I stripped the DRM from my Zune Marketplace tracks, I used Media Monkey to access the cover art from Amazon.com. Check it out:



That's resized slightly - the Amazon.com album art is 600 x 600 pixels (UPDATE: it's 500 x 500), and not over-compressed so you can still see the album art details.

Zune Marketplace, you've got to do better. Oh, if you're looking for high resolution album art, check this personal project of mine out.