Sound check: Why Katy Perry's new album actually stinks

Upon purchase, not only will we be able to gaze upon a painting by the American artist Will Cotton of the pneumatic singer lounging nude within a cloud of candyfloss — the CD version will really smell of the fairground treat.

While we should be grateful that the fragrant Miss Perry is pioneering this concept and not, say, Slipknot ("Free realistic rotting crow odour with every copy!"), is it really enough to persuade fans to part with extra cash for the CD over the download?

High-street music giant HMV relaunched its download store this week, hoping to sell more digital music to make up for declining CD sales. At the same time the CD itself is becoming just one element of a high-end physical package filled to bursting with special features.

We can dismiss the meagre temptations of the dreaded "bonus tracks" — B-sides and remixes tacked on the end of an album because nobody buys them attached to singles any more. They're now more common than a DFS sale weekend.

But certain bands are turning the CD into a beautiful, specialist product that's more for looking than listening. When you can stream the tunes on YouTube or Spotify in a split second, it's the other elements that need to be built to last.

There are musicians who have turned filmmakers, doing something far more ambitious than merely bunging on the pop videos for their recent singles.

The new Chemical Brothers album, Further (Virgin), comes with a DVD of abstract imagery for every track. Animal Collective's latest, Oddsac (Plexi), is billed as a "visual album", an hour of structureless surrealism that is probably best experienced under the influence of the same mind-altering drugs it looks like it has been made with.

Now that the environmentally disastrous plastic CD case is on its way out, the packaging is becoming more inventive too. Laura Marling's debut, Alas I Cannot Swim (EMI), came as a "song box" containing a gig ticket and a memento for each track.

The recent Beatles Mono and Stereo box sets (EMI) were deeply beautiful things capable of instilling drooling desire in the most committed illegal downloader, products to explore and fiddle with for hours or simply put on the mantlepiece. And this month singer-songwriter Kristin Hersh's new album, Crooked (The Friday Project), became the first to come as a book, in a collaboration with publisher HarperCollins.

What of the humble download, sometimes the price of one-and-a-half Mars bars, and often free? It's getting its own spoiler and go-faster stripes. Lately digital albums have been sold tacked on to T-shirts (rapper Mos Def's The Ecstatic (Downtown/Cooperative)) and a paper lantern (of Montreal's Skeletal Lamping (Polyvinyl)). The iTunes store now offers a handful of new albums as "iTunesLPs", incorporating animated lyrics, photos and videos. The latest releases by artists such as Janelle Monáe and Gorillaz are worth exploring but take-up appears to be low.

Meanwhile, synthpop artist Imogen Heap is currently pioneering the snappily named 3DiCD with her new album Ellipse (Sony) — essentially the sterile experience of flicking through liner notes on your laptop.

I can't help feeling that all this added value actually makes the music itself seem even more worthless.

If a great song isn't even worth 79p unless it comes with endless bells and whistles that will be glanced at once and forgotten about, it's a sad state of affairs for songwriters and performers.

It's undeniably more pleasurable to own a tactile thing than a few thousand computer files but the sheer convenience of going digital means the majority of people would rather find shelf space for a stamp-size iPod than a walnut veneer box set that glows in the dark. Maybe that isn't candyfloss wafting from Katy Perry's new CD — it's the smell of desperation.

NEW ON THE NET
When Disney decided belatedly to make a sequel to its sci-fi thriller Tron, it must have taken all of seven seconds to think of asking Daft Punk (below) to compose the soundtrack. The robotic Franch dance duo have revealed six tracks on the web prior to the film's release at Christmas. There are no obvious catchy theme tunes but plenty of dramatic electronics at http://blogs.1077theend.com/internbryce/2010/07/22/new-daft-punk-zomg/

Melbourne dance band Cut Copy recently turned down an offer to tour with Lady Gaga, which gives you some idea of their thoughts on pop music. Yet there are few catchier songs around right now than the first taster from their third album, the trippy vocals and glam-rock beats of Where I'm Going. Pick it up for free from cutcopy.net ahead of the album's release early next year.