Why do artists keep releasing so many album covers?

Since the dawn of popular music, the album cover has transcended its role as a means for simply protecting vinyl records and has become a vessel for storytelling in itself. The best covers have spawned subcultures and scandal, birthed lore and lawsuits, and even introduced microcelebrities and microtrends. 

There’s Grace Jones photographed by Jean-Paul Goude on the cover of Nightclubbing, looking dazzling and otherworldly with a cigarette dangling from her lips. Or, perhaps most famously, The Beatles’ Abbey Road, which sparked conspiracy theories about Paul McCartney’s death and, more than half a century later, still frustrates London cab drivers forced to detour around its now-iconic zebra crossing.

Today, though, major artists are trading in the power of a singular, era-defining image for a carousel of alternates. Just this year, Lady Gaga, Cardi B, Doja Cat and Florence and the Machine have all released multiple ‘collectable‘ covers, each available for pre-order on vinyl.

Sabrina Carpenter’s initial, discourse-inducing Man’s Best Friend cover seemed to push back against the safe tactics of her peers, spawning endless podcast episodes and think pieces that accused her of setting feminism back (telltale signs of an iconic cover). Yet even she soon released a handful of alternative “approved by God” versions, a move that inevitably diluted the cover’s impact in favour of a fiscally safe marketing play. And then there’s Taylor Swift, whose upcoming The Life of a Showgirl has seven alternative covers, each paired with different coloured vinyl. Swift is a veteran when it comes to encouraging overconsumption in music: she shilled her last album, the morose Tortured Poets Department, in 36 different variants. 

Of course, music fans have always collected vinyl, and owning physical media is an increasingly crucial way to enjoy and support art outside of the glare of our data-grabbing tech overlords. But the way fans now buy music in excess suggests that the rampant consumerism defining the 2020s has fully seeped into the music industry. Our current economy depends on our constant acquisition of goods, something that, until recently, has been difficult for music execs to capitalise on. Sure, we consume music in higher amounts than ever before, but monthly streaming fees are capped, and it has never made sense for most people, outside of the most ardent record collectors, to buy multiple versions of one album – until now. 

Our attitudes towards music are changing. A report from the University of Glasgow on the vinyl record consumption habits of Taylor Swift fans found that, while older fans like vinyl for the sound quality and the tangible act of playing a record, younger fans liked that it allows them to display their tastes and fandom – something rated as very important by 87 per cent of 18-24 year olds surveyed. Meanwhile, 57 per cent of respondents said they owned multiple copies of the same album, with some purchasing as many as eight versions. Despite this, fans are overwhelmingly still primarily streaming the records they own, with 87 per cent of respondents saying they stream for convenience ‘frequently’ or ‘all the time’. In other words, people are essentially buying multiple albums that they may rarely, or never, actually play. “This matters from a carbon perspective, because the vast majority of the world’s vinyl is made of PVC plastic, which is one of the most environmentally hazardous plastics we have,” explains Matt Brennan, Professor of Popular Music at the University of Glasgow.

So, what has spurred this shift in culture? Jonas Andersson, Associate Professor in Media & Communications Studies at Södertörn University, Stockholm, theorises that it’s a response to the “devaluing” of music that has emerged in the streaming age. Platforms like Spotify and Apple Music initially emerged as a hopeful solution to file-sharing and piracy at the dawn of the internet, allowing labels to lock their product behind paywalls again at a time when audiences were beginning to access it for free. However, Andersson points out, they were “immediately riddled with their own internal problems”, such as low fees for artists, complete ownership from labels and platforms prioritising background “muzak” over artistic innovation.

It makes sense that mega-stars would seek to reinstate a sense of demand in their work. “Ever since the birth of the cultural industries, there’s always been this tendency to invent artificial scarcity where there might not be any scarcity,” Andersson explains. It’s evident in the way these alternate covers or vinyl variants are occasionally marketed as being available for “48 hours only”, no doubt triggering a few FOMO-induced purchases.

What’s sad is that these very artists could channel the immense purchasing power of their devoted audiences to drive real, tangible change in the industry. In the aforementioned survey, Swifties were asked if, in efforts to reduce their carbon footprint and given that they prefer streaming anyway, they would be open to purchasing a cardboard sleeve to display the album’s artwork, along with a download link, without the actual PVC record. One in four said they would consider it. “That was really interesting to me, because Taylor has sold over four million records, so that’s potentially a million people,” Brennan says.

As Billie Eilish put it last year: “It’s some of the biggest artists in the world making fucking 40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more. It’s so wasteful, and it’s irritating to me that we’re still at a point where you care that much about your numbers and you care that much about making money.”

There’s a lot of innovation and creativity happening in the sustainable music space, which makes using unrecyclable PVC seem unnecessary. The Music Doughnut, a small research collective based in Scotland, for example, is experimenting with ways to take music into a “post-fossil fuel future”. Yet these efforts will depend on the backing of artists with major power and influence to truly take off. Right now, renewable materials for pressing records do exist, but the majority of pressing plants don’t currently use them due to a lack of demand. 

“If someone like Taylor came out and said, ‘I want my next record pressed in these new ways that are trying to be as environmentally friendly as possible’, pressing plants everywhere would have to take notice,” Brennan points out. “That could really accelerate change in terms of reducing the carbon footprint of music, and it would be a real step towards a culture shift.”

Of course, music isn’t the most polluting industry, and no artist can single-handedly halt the climate crisis. But if the pop stars of today insist on bombarding us with a myriad of uninspired album covers in the name of climbing the Billboard charts, couldn’t they at least try to reduce their carbon emissions in the process? After all, there will be no music on a dead planet, but there will be hundreds of thousands of unplayed, sparkling vinyl records – taking 1000 years to decompose.