Visual Communication In Music's Digital Age

Most of us remember opening up a CD, vinyl record, or cassette tape, turning on the music and staring at the cover, the liner notes, and the photos inside the album's packaging. In recent years, music downloads have displaced the purchase of physical copies, thereby compromising the role of visual communication in the musical consumption of products. A contextualizing blog article concerning how digital music consumption has changed over the last thirty years can be found here: Digital Fish blog. On the other hand, music videos have become increasingly more accessible for fans to receive visual stimuli from bands. Though the music video provides a more sensory resplendent avenue for listeners, it can potentially fail to establish ambiguity or listener agency of interpretation. Album art can staple a provocative image on the liner notes while maintaining its indeterminacy. Examples of this visual ambiguity can be found in the molotov cocktail pressed on the backside of Godspeed You Black Emperor's "Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada" compact disc packaging. 
The back of Godspeed You! Black Emperor's "Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada"-

As a note, album artwork can detail the band's relationship to visual artists in a similar way that music videos detail the relationship with a film director. Who could imagine The Velvet Underground without Andy Warhol's famous banana? 
The Andy Warhol banana that became the cover art for The Velvet Underground's debut album-

Oftentimes, watching a music video is like watching a movie based on a book you've already read, the images and the characters you had in your head to start with are then replaced by the film's and you become frustrated that you can't have your own images back. The film has somehow given you a stimuli and robbed you of your own intellectual property. 

Furthermore, album covers and liner notes establish a comprehensive message that could potentially be applied to the album as a whole. The music video works almost exclusively on an individual song basis. Thus, it appears probable that the listener's shift from listening to complete albums in their entirety to single songs at a time may result as a by-product of the visual departure from album art to music videos. 

What might this shift mean for post-rock which relies heavily upon creating a musical atmosphere versus delivering hit-singles? How should this characteristically wordless genre compensate to communicate an indeterminate message when music videos often require the viewer to forfeit their own preceding mental interpretations?