What was the first-ever album cover?
In the height of the digital age and a resurged interest in vinyl, picking the correct visuals to accompany the music is more important than ever. It can make or break a record sale, an extra gig attendee, or an online clickthrough. It can elevate a musician’s artistry or even surpass it. Some album covers have become works of art separate from their music, such as Andy Warhol’s visual contribution to The Velvet Underground and Nico.
With such a long-standing history of album artwork, both physically and digitally, it’s hard to believe that there was ever a time when music wasn’t accompanied by a square-shaped visual. For a long period, though, physical pieces of music were simply wrapped in cheap, blank cardboard or paper. To a young designer called Alex Steinweiss, this artistic limitation made no sense.
“To my mind, this was no way to package beautiful music,” he wrote in his book Alex Steinweiss: the inventor of the modern album cover. “They were so drab, so unattractive, I convinced the executives to let me design a few,” he once stated. True to his word, Steinweiss set out to make the first record artwork ever while acting as art director at Columbia Records.
He created the first-ever original, illustrated record cover for a Rogers and Hart collection titled Smash Hits From Rodgers and Hart. Released in 1940, the album artwork featured the name of the artist, album, and record label in lights, with a red, record-like shape overlaid. It’s a beautiful image, one that would pave the way for endless cover artwork to follow.
The image is of the real Imperial Theatre in New York. With a photographer in tow, Steinweiss asked the venue to change the sign to the words they needed for the artwork, and the photo became the first record cover ever. He continued to create original artwork for more releases and found that sales increased as a result.
This wasn’t Steinweiss’s only contribution to the development of the record sleeve – he also worked on the paper that would become the record packaging for years to come. The graphic designer was instrumental in the creation of vinyl as we know it now and in the early makings of music as more of a product.
Over 80 years on, vinyl packaging has gone far beyond original illustrations. Artists and their teams have been emboldened by creativity, including inserts, lyric books, download cards, and posters as part of their products. The Velvet Underground and Nico artwork contains a sticker and encourages people to “peel slowly and see”, while the reissue of Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia comes with a plantable download code full of seeds.
Thanks to Steinweiss’ early work in graphic design to accompany music, physical media has become a collectable item that some people will pick up just out of intrigue for the artwork. It may seem that music has become more commercial and more of a product, but accompanying visuals have also added so much to the artistry and connection within music.
See the cover below.
