20 Best Album Covers of the 1970s

Before digital downloads, before CDs — every long-playing record you bought came with 12 square inches of artwork. Artwork that seemed every bit as important as the music contained inside.

This article is part of a series — you can also check out the 20 Best Album Covers of the 1980s.

We are losing one of popular culture’s natural canvases in the transition to digital; the album cover.

In the late ’80s, record art began to shrink, first to CD size. Now, in the iTunes and Spotify era, an album cover is little more than an…