> It is Gallagher who, citing his daughter, argues that there is a lack of recognition of the album cover among younger generations, blaming factors including reduced budgets and the smaller picture formats used by streaming platforms.

I think the latter is an attribution error. I'd say it's more the change in consumption patterns brought about by format changes.

Now I'm not a consumer of vinyls, my experience is mostly with my father's collection of LPs, but my recollection is that first not all sleeves have spines, so unless you know exactly where each of them is when looking for an album you need to pull it out, check the front cover and put it back, thus you quite quickly associate covers with albums. Furthermore if you have a mix of spined and spineless sleeves you might just pull all of them to make the movement more regular. Second getting the LP out of the sleeve is a process, during which the cover is likely the thing you most see (unless it's a box set with plain sleeves), and third most spineless sleeves are pretty flimsy so you need to store them carefully when empty, which usually means laying them flat next to the record player, with the cover in full view.

Those are all opportunities for the cover to shine.

The CD already started changing that, a crystal case always has a spine (the only CDs without spines I had were low-quality bulk CD-Rs, as well as a few Verbatim spindles and boxes, but those were completely naked) so to find a CD you just go through the spines, pattern matching the art & font then checking on the actual printed name. Then a CD's case and a CD are quite resilient, you open the case, grab the CD by the edges and put it in the player, closing the case and chucking it. As long as you don't throw the case across the floor it'll make it, so there's little care required.

This means you can see the cover a fair bit, and some CD-era covers are still iconic, but there's a lot less opportunity for it to shine, and a lot less space as well (an LP sleeve has 10 times the surface as a CD case). Plus a CD gets you more playtime with less interaction alongside the smaller format, much unlike EP and LPs: up to 72mn without getting next to the record, where an LP (or EP) would require either flipping to the B side (an opportunity to see the cover) or swapping after the end of A (even more cover time).

But then came the turn of the millenium, with media players and PMPs. Technically you could show album art in most media players but then that'd increase the space taken by the track, sizing was inconsistent between viewers, and most of the time you'd just chuck a playlist in and put it in the background so why bother? PMPs were worse as they simply didn't have the capability to show album art (I assume portable CD players were similar). The oddballs buying official MD releases might have album art on the go, but the format would be even smaller than on a CD case (about 1/3rd the surface).

Outside of stores, I'm not sure I saw an album cover between 2000 (or realistically a bit earlier) and 2008 when I got my first iphone and the rare embedded album cover would grace the music application's screen. But then the media player problem raises its head, if I'm looking at my phone while listening to music, it's probably to do something else with it, so it's not like I can see the album art. Likewise when listening to my music in the car, usually I've got navigation going on on the display, not album art.

Streaming is really just a continuation of that, and the death of the album which has been ongoing since the displacement of the CD started.

Though if anything I'd say I see more and higher-resolution album covers these days: on youtube at least it seems common for artists to use the album cover (sometimes playful variations thereof) as the video frame for tracks which don't rate an MV (outside of music.youtube.com, mind), so this is visible when putting youtube on a side display for music.