Is album artwork a thing of the past? It’s 70 years since canny artists saw the long playing record sleeve as a canvas for artwork to enhance a bands’ image. But with digital downloads now the norm where does that leave vinyl junkies and music fans?

For generations of music fans, the album cover has a special place. We all have our favourites (and least favourite) – images stared at and studied in teenage bedrooms the world over. It gave you a sense of identification and enhancement of the your favourite band or artist, with sleeve notes, lyrics and much more.

Iconic record sleeves such as Andy Warhol’s banana on the front of the first Velvet Underground record to the underwater baby pursuing a dollar bill on the cover of Nirvana‘s Nevermind, these were pictures that brought the world of your favourite band that little bit closer, and made tshirt merchandisers rub their hands together with glee.

Now sleeve is no more – it shrunk to five inches with the CD, and now download images on most MP3 players artworks is the of a postage stamp if you’re lucky.

Columbia Records were the first to commission sleeve art in the late 1930′s and in the ’60s the Beatles took album art to a new level – Sgt Pepper, with its colourful cast of characters, came in a gatefold cover complete with a psychedelic inner sleeve and even a cardboard moustache to cut out and keep.

Jump 20 years and New Order commissoned Peter Saville to incorporate the look of a computer floppy disc on the best selling 12-inch ever, Blue Monday. It famously cost so much to produce Factory Records lost money on every copy sold.

Pink Floyd ‘extra member’ Storm Thorgerson went on to become their designer-in-chief, creating some of the most famous album sleeves of the era, and enhancing the otherworldy nature of some of Pink Floyd‘s psychedelia.

From the cow on Atom Heart Mother, to the burning businessman on the sleeve of Wish You Were Here, and the giant pig flying over Battersea Power Station on Animals and – most famously of all – the prism spreading a spectrum of colour across The Dark Side Of The Moon.

Even though vinyl sales are up on past years, sleeve art is on its way out, but many see its place taken in the form of billboards and advertising, gig images, screensavers, even as framed pieces of art.
But the traditional album sleeve that has excited generations of music lovers will never hold the same fascination for fans of the future.

Until then we just have to listen to the music!