Brief History:
Alex Steinweiss was hired by Columbia Records in 1938 to be the art director. He is credited with being the creator of the concept of an album cover/artwork. By the late 40s creating an album cover had become very popular and continues to be into more contemporary times.
As technology advanced album covers are not used as much on CDs. Due to iTunes artists no longer need to package their music in CDs but can distribute them electronically. However this has not completely removed CDs. They are still very popular and need artwork on the cover to stand out. Although music is now distributed electronically, you still receive the album cover artwork electronically too and is displayed on your media device when listening to the album.
To a lot of people the album cover does not matter as it is all about the music, however some bands went too far with their covers and lead them to be banned. This includes Kanye West's 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy' Due to the sexual act depicted.
Many album covers don't relate to the artist or genre in anyway as some might expect. Here are some examples:
Some don't contain the album name:
Some don't contain the artist name:
However there are some that do follow a certain pattern. A popular one of this would be Daft Punk as a lot of their album covers are the same but in a different colour.
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