The History of Album Covers

Roles
Album covers serves extremely important roles in advertising music, these roles are:

• To advertise the content of the music product.
• To convey artistic aspirations of the artists.
• An image of a piece of artwork which is always recognised to be related to the music artist.
• Also, it acts as a protective sleeve.

History
In 1910 the 78rpm records were created as a replacement of the phonograph cylinders.
Phonograph Cylinder

78rpm record and cover

These 78rpm records were approximately 10" to 12" and were packaged in large brown paper sleeves, which were commonly plain but sometimes printed with the names of the producers and retailers. During the early 1930's album collections were beginning to be sold in packages, which included songs of the same genre, or the most recent popular songs. However, album covers and album packages became most appealing in 1938 as Columbia Records hired their first art director who invented the concept of album covers and cover art. Soon after other record labels noticed how beneficial cover art was, and began featuring their own colourful album covers.

The album cover became an important feature in the music culture, as well as acting as a marketing tool, it was also appreciated as just art. Albums became desirable as it began including gate folds with inserts of lyrics and images of the music artist. Soon covers became extremely notable, even the artists gained fame from both inside and out of the music industry. Nevertheless, as technology is evolving the purpose of album covers are changing since the sales of music online is increasing. However, this has given record labels the opportunities to begin using other medias such as websites, artist blogs or social websites such as twitter.