By DAVID BROWNE

Music geeks flipping through the CD booklet for Teddy Thompson’s “A Piece of What You Need,” released in June in the United States , may be in for a shock.
Instead of the names of the musicians and technicians who worked on the album of the London-born artist, or any thankyou’s to friends, they’ll find a photo of a beach, followed by a blank panel. One sentence directs listeners to Mr. Thompson’s Web site for “full album credits and more details.”
“I don’t think that many people are buying CDs, and they aren’t looking at the booklets,” Mr. Thompson, 32, said. “I love reading that stuff, but the days of booklets are over.”
Album liner notes and credits are another emerging victim of the Internet age. Sales of digital downloads continue to gain on those of CDs. But the names of the people who wrote, produced and played on songs are almost nowhere to be found on iPods.
Neil Tesser, the vice chairman of the Recording Academy, said the Internet is now as much a source for track information as are physical albums. Wikipedia features thousands of entries for albums that list song titles and personnel. And in general album purchases on iTunes come with downloadable credits.
Yet as anyone who has used Wikipedia knows, it isn’t always error free, and iTunes customers can only download credits if the record companies have supplied them to Apple.
“The real music heads will seek it out,” said Mr. Tesser, who also writes jazz liner notes. “But it’s less convenient.
You have to sit at your computer or print it out, as opposed to holding something in your hand and glancing at while the music’s playing and thinking, ‘Oh, let me look up what’s going on here.’ ”
Scanning the small-print data crammed into album packaging can reveal aspects of an artist not always evident in the music.
A one-and-a-half-page list in Alicia Keys’s 2007 album “As I Am,” in which she thanks her legal team, “all the retail stores” and the people who made the recording equipment in her studio, shows what a savvy music- industry politician she is.
The demise of liner notes could even affect the chronicling of music. “As there’s less demand for it, companies are going to be less likely to print up a booklet that can then be made available as a PDF,” Mr. Tesser said.
Complaints from fans about the absence of credits with his album encouraged Mr. Thompson to include full track information on the British version of the album, out next month.
“I was trying to do the right thing. I thought I could accomplish more in the virtual world,” he said.
Mr. Thompson wondered if one day “it’ll go back to the way it was in the ‘50s, when you never knew who did the string arrangements on a record.”
But, he said, “it would be very sad if that happened.”