However, by using selected reference tools and a knowledge of album cover art and historical styles, the catalogers are able to more accurately pinpoint the date of release of an album for the researcher. Tips on Dating the Undated LP Remember, these are guidelines to help you date an LP, not hard and fast rules. A guess at a decade is certainly more helpful to the patron than a guess at a century. Album covers have featured some of the 20th century's most famous iconography. Whole books have been written on the subject.
Cover art is minimal, and favors the easily reproduced line-drawing.
Digital artwork, airbrush techniques, and refined graphics are a hallmark of album covers from 1967 and beyond . This is said to be a direct relation of the psychedelic and drug cultures' influence. Cover content changes as standards of decency shift . Rock and roll and Popular genres in the early years almost always featured very clean-cut looking groups of people, mostly white. Classical music really didn't try much in the way of overtly marketing their artists for sex appeal until about the mid-eighties.