Why records are called albums, and how the album era rose and fell
Records are called albums because early 78s were so fragile they were sold tucked into blank booklets that looked like photo albums, wrapped in plain brown paper. When Columbia launched the long-playing vinyl disc in 1948, the name stuck. It took the Beatles to turn the format into pop's main artistic unit.
Before the LP, a shellac 78 held just three to five minutes a side, which boxed songwriters in. Columbia's chief engineer Peter Carl Goldmark developed the 12-inch vinyl microgroove record, spinning at 33⅓ rpm and holding up to 26 minutes per side. The label's art director Alex Steinweiss added designed covers, which lifted sales so much that illustrated sleeves were standard by the 1950s. The very first LP was a Mendelssohn violin concerto played by Nathan Milstein.
For years the long format belonged to classical music, Broadway casts and jazz players such as Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, who liked the room for extended improvisation. My Fair Lady became the first LP to sell a million copies. Pop, though, ran on seven-inch singles; Elvis's career was built on them. Critics still argue over the first concept album, with candidates ranging from Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads in 1940 to Sinatra's thematic 1950s records and the Beach Boys' hot-rod songs.
The shift came with the Beatles. Rubber Soul, released in December 1965 without a hit single in its US edition, sold 1.2 million copies there in nine days, and historians call it the moment the album replaced the song as the basic unit of pop. A wave of ambitious 1966 records followed, from Pet Sounds to Blonde on Blonde, and Sgt. Pepper in 1967 arrived in a gatefold sleeve with printed lyrics just as serious rock criticism took off in America.
The model bent but held for decades. In the 1980s punk, disco and MTV revived the single, and labels answered with pricier CDs and elaborate album rollouts built around a lead single, a video and a tour. Industry revenue peaked at 15 billion dollars in 1999. Then Napster, downloads and streaming broke albums back into tracks, and by the 2000s acts were again focused mainly on singles.
Source: Album era
