Album cover artwork was introduced over 50 years ago and was a new form of bringing together the work of two artists, the musicians and the designers.
It worked to create a visual representation of a non visual art form. The designers used their knowledge of the music industry to portray the message from the music to the cover art.
It was Alex Steinweiss, designer for Columbia Records who came up with the idea of replacing boring plain covers that would typically consist of the bands name and maybe a price ticket with original artwork in 1939. In doing this the albums became more popular and resulted in sales going up, proving that not everyone was buying the albums for the music alone but for the added bonus of a piece of art.
His simple idea produced a whole new area of illustration in the form of album cover art and his covers are still regarded as icons.
Looking through the history of album covers you can see how much of an impact the changes had. With the introduction of gatefold covers for example on The Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band the album came with a gatefold cover, cut out inserts and lyrics, this new added originality grasped the customers attention and resulted in these types of covers being used by many more artists after The Beatles. Also looking through different time periods you see how the style of design used on the album covers changed. Before 1960 there was a period where most appeared with an artistic photo perhaps of the band maybe in black and white whereas after 1960 it changed as design became more greatly influenced by pop culture. Nowadays album cover design is being created under the added influence of demographics and semiotics.
Music has progressed through various forms, vinyl, cassette, mini disc, C.D and Mp3 and in todays society digital music and downloading seem to be growing in popularity and gradually taking over. This leads to the question is the industry for album art dying out? I would like to think not as more effort is being put into getting the art included with the downloadable music files available online.
Even though downloading is growing more popular in todays society there are still a considerable amount of people who religiously buy the albums in the form that you can physically hold, I know I still do, more for sentimental reasons to do with being able to have something to keep to look back on in the future.
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