The History of Album Art
18 comments
·May 2, 2025ChrisMarshallNY
Friend of mine is a retired, high-level music exec.
He has a story about the cover art for Their Greatest Hits (Eagles)[0].
The bird skull is sitting in what looks like "snow."
Apparently, that's what it was. After the shoot, they snorted it all.
[0] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0566/5105/5295/files/eagle...
boomboomsubban
The artist says that's a common myth https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/how-the-eagles...
julianeon
It's not dead yet. Since vinyl is profitable we'll still be seeing new album art for years to come.
"In the first half of 2023, vinyl records brought in 72% of all non-digital recorded music format revenues in the US."
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
So... With "digital" being slang for "not physical", are CDs part of the denominator?
MassPikeMike
This is great and has a lot of early historical perspective that I had never seen chronicled before.
But it is necessarily limited in the amount of album covers it can feature from what many would consider to be their heyday, the 1950s through the 1970s.
If you just want to feast your eyes on a lot of great album covers from that period, pick up a copy of the "Album Cover Album" [1] or one of its six (!) follow-ups. Designers Storm Thorgerson (who worked with Pink Floyd) and Roger Dean (who worked with Yes) created these incredibly lush books, with album covers printed nice and large in vivid color, organized in a really insightfully thematic way. A bit more speedy than your average used book, but not by much. Highly recommended, good for hours of reverie.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5304267-album-cover-albu...
the-rc
Thorgerson and Powell ran Hipgnosis, which made a large number of the craziest and most memorable covers of the 70s/80s, not just PF. There are only three days left to watch the great documentary that Anton Corbijn made about them: https://www.netflix.com/us/title/81721595
ryandrake
Gotta admit: Yes's wild album covers drew me in so that their sound could get me hooked on Prog Rock so long ago. Creative album covers seem to be one of the many victims of today's single-focused and streaming-focused music landscape.
rufus_foreman
>> Roger Dean (who worked with Yes)
And Space Needle, https://store-us.rogerdean.com/products/space-needle-59x86cm....
wombatpm
And Asia
ChrisMarshallNY
Some time ago, someone here posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40795227
It was a "TIL" day, for me.
gwbas1c
> In the early 1900s, ... Early vinyl records
Vinyl didn't come out until much later. In the early 1900s records were made from acetate, and could shatter.
mixmastamyk
My grandma had shellac records in storage, which we took out once.
etothet
From the article, in regards to Blakey, Monk, Bird, Dizzy, and Trane: “…because of their drinking, drug use, and frenetic schedules, labels wouldn’t work with them.”
Is this claim documented somewhere? (All but one of the footnote links are dead for me)
yubblegum
Factory Records not even mentioned? Their cover art certainly charted a new aesthetic.
andy-p
I'll just leave this here... https://halfmanhalfbiscuit.uk/back-again-in-the-dhss/dickie-...
creeble
There's also a full documentary movie "The Cover Story" by Eric Christensen that is pretty interesting, if long and redundant in parts.
ForOldHack
Here is a book on the history of the best, curated by Roger Dean: ( There are 3 volumes.. )
Honourable mentions to Barbara Wojirsch, creator of the house style of the ECM Scandi jazz label, which is a cleaner descendant of some of the 50s styles.
https://ecmrecords.com/
Also Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson of Hypgnosis, who created a long line of definitive covers for artists from the 70s and 80s, including Pink Floyd. (I met Thorgerson once. He was notorious for being a complete arse - and so it proved. Unique talent though.)
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/hipgnosis-lif...
And of course Factory Records and Pete Saville, especially this infamous classic "sample" from an astronomy paper.
https://f.media-amazon.com/images/I/81T-loBJ40L._SL1291_.jpg