The prevalence of record sleeve design, when looking at it's presentation in the modern market

Once again, whilst reading The Colouring of Jazz by Carissa Kowalski Dougherty; a very valid point was raised and it's something something that I'd like to explore.

In the essay they explore the concept that record sleeves became highly popular in the 1950's, especially Jazz records because where there had been little variation and display in the past; there was now racks full of colourful, easily browsed records to touch and look at.
And saying that this change influenced sales seems like a very plausible hypothesis to me, and I highly doubt that it's wrong because it's exactly the reason I got into record collecting.

What I'd like to do is look at home, in this modern era I would browse digital music from a popular source and how I would browse tangible record sleeves, also from a popular source (high street store) to see whether – even though records make up a very small amount of stock for modern music shops – that they are still prevalent or whether they just stand out to the niche and collectors market.

iTunes

iTunes Store Homepage

iTunes is by far the largest music retailer for digital music, so much so it's become a norm and milestone for an artist to sell their wares through the iTunes market.
Above is a screen shot I took of the opening screen for the iTunes Store of which reserves it's spaces for the best selling and newest content, with a hierarchy bowing to the bigger releases, then filtering down to the small releases and the best sellers; much like how records would have been previously structured in a shop.

For my argument I'm want to see if the traditional sleeve, the album cover design, had lost it's prevalence and importance in the modern day music market.
If you look at the image above, the album covers start at a 300x300 pixel square and progress to get smaller as their importance also shrinks; though the artist name and related text stays at a similar size.
This proves to reinforce the idea that in our modern day, the artists name and fame have more importance and draw than the design on the sleeve, because the way me consume the media has changed.

HMV

The image above is an image of the vinyl section at my local HMV shop; which has recently become my cities largest modern vinyl stockist, as it tried to keep in-line with the vinyl revival that we are currently in. As you may be able to see, it's not huge but what it does have, is a rack, with the sleeves facing outwards, in which to attract customers.

Unlike iTunes, you cannot change the size of a 12" sleeve, so has accommodated them in a format that allows their designs, names and big sellers attract custom. Though strangely just like iTunes there is an obvious hierarchy, that works in almost the exact same way.

At the top we have the big releases and the big sellers, filtering down to the newer products and average selling records and at the bottom is the stock that isn't in the light at all. But unlike iTunes, the bottom of the hierarchy is seen to just be ordered rather than forward facing; so it will fall back on sales being driven by the bands name or reputation.