Album Covers

Album covers are known as the front packaging of a comercially released audio recording album. The cover serves three main purposes, they are:

1. To advertise the contents of the music product
2. To convey the artistic aspirations of the original artists.
3. In reproductions of the artists, to serve as a primary image in the promotional efforts surrounding the product, as an identifiable image associated with it.

History

In the year of 1910, seventy eight records replaced phonograph cylinder as the medium for recorded sound. Sold in diameter sizes of 10" and 12", during 1910 the records were usually sold seperately in a brown paper or cardboard sleeves. These cardboardf sleeves were generally a circular cutout, this allowed the record label to stand out clearly. In order to show the producers or retailers name the sleeves were either plain or printed.

In 1909, German record company "Odeon" initiated the "album" when releasing "Nutcracker Suite" by Tchaikovsky. This was released as a four double-sided discs.Bound collections of empty sleeves at the beginning of the 1920's were sold as "recording albums". They consisted of empty sleeves with a simple plain cardboard or leather cover. They were sold in dimensions of 10" and 12" sizes. In order to allow the records to stand upright on the shelf, the cover of the bound books were produced as wide and tall products with the records inside them.

Several record companies in the 1930's commenced on issuing collections of 78rpm records by one performer or one genre of music. These albums were commenced in specially assembled albums, some included a collection of admired songs.

Alex Steinweiss was hired by Coloumbia Records in 1938. This was Columbia Records first director, Alex successfully invented the concepts of an album cover. Previously, in the past , album covers were used as plain backgrounds, however with Alex Steinweiss thew invention of "cover art" changed this completely. Due to Alex Steinweiss is productive invention, several other record companies began to follow his lead. For all major companies, record labels released their records with their albums featuring colourful backgrounds, contrasting to previous album covers which had been released. Some of there designs used classical art while others created their own designs.

Formats

Popular music was distributed from the 1950's through to the 1980's by the 12" LP record and the 45rpm record. Today, the LP format is still used occassionally, however as the years have gone on there has been many new formats. It is since the mid 1990's, the CD has been the most common form of a music product. There are two very common forms of packaging today, they are the plastic jewel case and the cardboard and plastic combination otherwise known as a Digipak. These Digipak's are usually 4.75 inches square.