Why are art prints one of the most thoughtful gifts for music fans?
When you are looking for a gift for music fans it is easy to fall back on vinyl, books or merchandise, all of which they probably already have. One category consistently does something those cannot: a wall art print that tells them something new about music they have listened to for thirty years.
I have spent years mapping discographies as tube maps: studio albums become stations, credited musicians become lines running between them, and one-off contributors become branch lines. The result is data first and decoration second, which is exactly why it works as a present. A fan can stand in front of one for twenty minutes and keep finding things.
What a music map shows that a discography list cannot
The point is not that the information is rare. Most of it is on the sleeves. The point is that nobody can hold a whole catalogue in their head at once, and a map makes the shape of it visible in a second.
Some examples from maps I have drawn:
- Billy Bragg's first album credits one musician. His 1991 album credits twenty-three. Then in 2010 he is back down to one. You can see that career expand and contract from across a room.
- Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man (1977) carries more than forty credited musicians, which is more than his first four albums put together. Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg are both on it, singing background vocals.
- Cody Johnson's first five records were made by essentially one man, and then the counts run 16, 23, 43, 36. The map changes character halfway across.
- On the Steely Dan map the longest sideman line is Victor Feldman's, on seven of the nine albums. Not a name most people would predict.
None of that is opinion, and none of it is something a poster of an album cover can do.
How I research and build the prints
Every map starts as a spreadsheet. I work from album liner notes, session documentation and film credits, one release at a time, and I only draw a line once the credit is on a sleeve I can point to. Where a musician is credited under two different names across two decades, both credits go on the map, because that is what the sleeves say.
They are hand-designed rather than generated, and they are corrected when a collector sends me something I have missed. You can read more about how the maps are made.
Film plot maps for the film fan in the same house
The same grammar works on cinema. On a film plot map the stations are plot points in order and the lines are characters, so you can follow one person's route through a story and see exactly where they cross somebody else. Franchises are where it gets interesting, because a character line can disappear for four films and come back.
Music map headers are blue and film map headers are red. Everything else about the layout is deliberately identical, so once you have learned to read one you can read all of them.
Choosing the right one as a gift
Three things worth thinking about before you pick:
- Go for the artist they are completist about, not the one they merely like. The maps reward obsession. Somebody who owns three albums will enjoy it; somebody who owns all of them will read it for an hour.
- Long careers make denser prints. A forty-year catalogue with a rotating cast gives you far more to look at than a tight five-album run.
- Check the size against the wall. These are detailed prints with a lot of small type, and A1 is the size most people end up wanting for the busier maps.
Print specification
Every print is a museum-quality Giclée on 230gsm acid-free fine art paper with a textured matte finish, made to order. Most maps are offered in A2 (420 x 594mm) and A1 (594 x 841mm) landscape, with US inch sizes for American customers. A few of the largest maps are produced in A1 only, because the detail does not survive being reduced. The sizes available for any given map are listed on its own product page.
Where to start
The discography map collection covers around seventy artists and bands, and the film plot map collection covers franchises and single films. If the person you are buying for has an artist nobody has mapped yet, get in touch.
