Album Covers

Like all meaningful design, album art is so much more than just packaging. It is a crucial piece of how a band, album, and genre are perceived, and a major contributing factor to the culture of music as a whole in the postwar era.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw4YmbAKocM 

The history of records began in 1857, when Eduardo-Lean Scott created the phonautograph, which used a vibrating pen to record sounds onto paper discs. The idea was furthered by inventor Emilie Berliner, who invented the hand-wound gramophone in 1867 to play vinyl records. Thomas Edison then used this concept to invent a machine that could replay the recorded sounds, similarly using a stylus to cut grooves into tin. Over the following decades, the record went through a series of changes in size until Columbia Records released their 33 1/3 RPM records on polyvinyl chloride in 1948. This design prevailed until the invention of CDs in 1982, and the eventual switch to digital downloads. Still, thanks in part to the significance assigned to the physical album and cover as pieces of art, records remain an important collectible item today.