Wow, that’s the first time ever that my work has blocked a Wikipedia article.
It was released, but you had to special order it. The US version of the album had a “B” on the record’s catalog number, and was what was sent out to record stores. However, a store could order the “A” cover if they desired (I did for our store). AFAIK, that was an American pressing.
But ultimately, it boils down to prosecutors, and some are quite willing to make a name for themselves by arresting people who sell anything with nudity. There was a case a few years ago where a comic book store was prosecuted for selling porn to minors despite the fact that the books were clearly marked as adult, put in a separate section, and sold only to those with ID. The reasoning was that “these are comic books, so they’re for children.” Really.
Was that prosecution successful?
FTR, an album is not a vinyl medium. It’s an intangible collection of songs, similar to a photo album. If you have Thriller on cassette, CD, and vinyl, you’ve only got one album. It’s the same as how “photo album” can refer to a collection of pictures on Facebook or physical prints in a book. The thing you put on a turn table is called a record, not an album.
Just thought I’d get that out of the way.
FTR, a record is not a vinyl medium. It’s permanent reminder of something. If you have any way of retrieving text, sound or pictures it’s a record. The thing you put on a turntable is called a vinyl disk (or, de facto, a record or an album.)
Just thought I’d get that out of the way.
FTR? Good one. 
Tell it to those damn kids! I know what an album is. And it includes art work, lyrics, posters, and a giant rolling paper. Let’s see the internet do the last one.
Right. An album is the large thing that’s not a 45. Albums had covers. Records didn’t.
If you don’t talk the talk, you can’t walk the walk. 
I always found it irksome (back in the vinyl days) when people would refer to a rock ‘disk’ as an album when it was just one track per side (or one track split over two sides). Or a recording of a single classical symphony on a disk.
Eventually I became inured to the usage and, rarely for me, pedantry took a back seat.
In today’s usage, the difference between an album and a 45 is that an album contains photographs and a 45 contains bullets. Neither term is used of recorded-music media.
That’s clearly false. Recording artists still regularly release what they are calling “albums.” There’s no other term for it. That’s even how you search for them on Itunes.
if there was just one cut per side of a usually 12" 33.3 RPM or 10"8 RPM vinyl disc recording then it would it be just an LP and not an album? although if two would constitute a collection then it might be. or was the packaging appearance enough to call it an album?
That’s a distinction I have never heard or read at any time in my life until this thread. It’s silly even for pedantry. Note than even qpw3141 gave it up.
English idioms do not have to logical, grammatical, or literal. Criticizing them on that basis just makes the speaker look foolish.
It looks like it was: Texas vs. Castillo. It makes for depressing reading.
Those big black circular vinyl things? They’re called LPs. Short for “long players”.
Sick!
was it an album because it was a collection or was it an album because of its packaging?
i don’t recall it ever being a collection causing the usage either.
the 78s were packaged as boxed sets or sleeve pages in a hard cover from the earliest times as far as i know. the packaging was then similar to photo albums so that would be my guess as to the origin. if the slim single disc sleeve of later times was the original package then then would never have been called albums just LPs.
Yes, the original “record album” was a set of 78s in a hard-bound album, containing perhaps six to twelve songs. When LPs came along, it was possible to put onto a single disc all the songs that would have previously come in an entire album… so the term “album” came to be applied to a single LP.
Blind Faith was issued on CD in the US with the nude album cover. The uncensored art (if you can call it that) is even available on Amazon.
ETA: Broke the link because it’s not safe for work.
A quick search shows the repeated claim that ‘record album’ dates from 1957, specifically for LPs, and because of the fold open double cover’s resemblance to a photo album. And the internet is never wrong. Single sleeve LPs were called albums too though. And it wouldn’t surprise me if the older 78 collections were called albums by somebody. Are CDs called albums? I don’t know, ask one of those damn kids!
Of course they are. And don’t forget the Grammy Award given out every year for “Album of the Year”.