Are gatefold sleeves on single-disc LPs just a waste of space?

I get the rationale on double albums, but it seems every second single-disc LP now has to have a gatefold sleeve with a massive room-sucking spine.

Personally I'd rather have a standard sleeve that takes up half the space. Some of us live in apartments where space is at premium. I'd rather use my storage space on more music, rather than having some half-baked gatefold art or lyrics I'll never look at.

Hope I'm not alone on this. It really irks me.

I like gatefolds just fine, but those thick oversized spines need to go away ASAP, I loathe them

depends what's in the gatefold I guess (I appreciate the art and lyrics! sometimes), but yes there's definitely a trend towards making records heavier and thicker which I am guessing is done to make them appeal more as collectors items, as opposed to the old days when they'd cheap out on packaging knowing that people were buying these just to listen to them

I'm definitely with you, I'm starting to use up all my storage space as well. amusingly the thickest spine in my collection (for a 2xLP set) is Balls by Sparks, an album everyone pretty much forgot about, it's kind of silly

also thick spines don't fit well in record sleeves

Gatefolds are only a waste of space when Roger Dean is involved.

hey now

you'll have to pry my gatefold of Yes "Drama" outta my cold dead hands

Strangely enough, it was those Roger Dean gatefolds that drew me in to my dad's LP collection when I was a kid and sparked a lifelong obsession with music.

I remember being confused that the music on Graceland or the King Crimson records was so much better than the Yes records with cool sci-fi sleeves. It didn't make sense.

Who wants a world where Tres Hombres has a non-gatefold sleeve?

Ironically, the only ZZ Top album without a gatefold is called Frank Gatefold.

haha!

My childhood wouldn't have been the same without the Pepper gatefold.

For me the worst thing about these was when I was DJing '70s Rock nights and I was having to leave stuff at home because I only had so much room in my bags because so many of those albums of the period were designed that way.

Just thinking of Neil Young alone, I'm glad Everybody Knows, Gold Rush, and Tonight's the Night are gatefolds. All have great photos inside.

I just recently got a 2LP set with both discs tucked into an extra-capacious single sleeve, which I thought was kinda chintzy. (And now that I think about it, my original 1988 2LP of Metallica's ...And Justice For All might have come that way, too!) I'm anti-vinyl generally, but if you're gonna do it, go gatefold.

Autechre NTS Sessions have *3* LPs in a single sleeve, plus extra-thin inners. that said they are only like $25 a piece which is pretty nice

imo the bigger issue is with bad inner sleeves, the thick glossy paper ones are cool it damages the records when they go in and out of those. and so many of them do it. you need to use your own plastic inner sleeve.

The late ‘70s/early ‘80s reissue pressings of early Who albums crammed two discs into one jacket. As a 10-year-old new Who fan, this was fine with me, as each double set went for the price of a single LP.

i'm sorry i'm having a hard time relating. isn't, like. owning LPs at all kind of inefficient, storage space-wise? i think of LPs as being in some sense _luxurious_. so you're in that consumer niche of people who are invested enough in music to spare the luxury of having music on LP in your apartment, but not sufficiently invested in music to have single LPs with gatefold sleeves and... look, I'm sympathetic, but it really does seem like kind of a niche thing to me? i could be wrong. maybe we should get some data on it. if i'm getting an LP i'm not getting it for the sound quality but because it is big and beautiful and luxurious and gatefolds play into that, for me.

i mean on the other hand when i get a blu-ray box set, _those_ are pretty economic packages. it's luxurious in a different sense, reams of digital content but the package is small and easy to, uh, tuck away somewhere.

The late ‘70s/early ‘80s reissue pressings of early Who albums crammed two discs into one jacket. As a 10-year-old new Who fan, this was fine with me, as each double set went for the price of a single LP.

MCA really cheaped out on their budget reissues, deleting gatefolds, inner sleeve art, and yeah, stuffing doubles into single sleeves.

...and that continued into their early CDs, which frequently only carried over the front cover art.

+1 on the lack of plastic sleeves - the number of new LPs I get that are mega scuffed simply from rubbing against the cardboard, or glued inside their sleeve with static - if it is a generic paper sleeve i just rip/cut it off - but don’t wanna do that with the printed ones

feels weird to be calling for use of more plastic, but i guess a new record is an environmentally indefensible hunk of plastic anyway, if you feel they should exist then you should ensure they retain their use value for longer than a year or two

I had those MCA Who reissues at a similar age. I always wondered why they paired My Generation with Magic Bus The Who on Tour. Chronologically inaccurate! There was nothing about that packaging that enabled you to put those records into perspective.

Autechre NTS Sessions have *3* LPs in a single sleeve, plus extra-thin inners. that said they are only like $25 a piece which is pretty nice

I don't know, if you are making vinyl records, it is easy to want to explore the artistic possibilities.

you can't roll a joint on a download

Rolling joints with gatefold LP's like the generations of stoners before me #hemispheres #rush #lavillastrangiato pic.twitter.com/zTYvUP9Qn2

— Sofa King (@JimmehSharpe) June 2, 2018

i'm sorry i'm having a hard time relating. isn't, like. owning LPs at all kind of inefficient, storage space-wise? i think of LPs as being in some sense _luxurious_.

You make some great points. But it's not all about owning a luxury item. For me, it's about forging a durable, tactile connection with an album, and the rituals that go along with that.

There are also many ways to create a very special (even luxurious) object without defaulting to a gatefold with a massive spine. I'm thinking in particular about G!YBE's F#A# Infinity, which comes in a slender single sleeve made of beautiful embossed card stock, with a black and white photograph attached to the front, and various inserts (including a Canadian penny crushed on train tracks). It takes up little space but feels very special indeed.

But I do get that I'm probably in a niche minority here. I just want more space for records, dammit! There's no good reason why Sharon Van Etten's 1LP Are We There needs a spine as thick as Boards of Canada's 3LP Geogaddi. (Which really should be a 2LP album without the etched F side but that's another argument...)

the superfluous gatefolds really only became an issue in, idk, the 2010s? most old-school gatefolds really aren't THAT thick, but these days every new album is as thick on the shelf as a box set.

otm, that's the real problem

MCA really cheaped out on their budget reissues, deleting gatefolds, inner sleeve art, and yeah, stuffing doubles into single sleeves.

― an icon of a worried-looking, long-haired, bespectacled man (C. Grisso/McCain), Friday, July 1, 2022 7:02 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

...and that continued into their early CDs, which frequently only carried over the front cover art.

― an icon of a worried-looking, long-haired, bespectacled man (C. Grisso/McCain), Friday, July 1, 2022 7:04 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I had those MCA Who reissues at a similar age. I always wondered why they paired My Generation with Magic Bus The Who on Tour. Chronologically inaccurate! There was nothing about that packaging that enabled you to put those records into perspective.

― Josefa, Friday, July 1, 2022 7:39 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

The funny thing is, the non-gatefold Who reissues had a paper insert with the photos and other info from the original gatefold.

It had to be chronologically inaccurate; otherwise, you'd get Sell Out with Magic Bus, and the latter repeats two Sell Out songs. But the shoddy reissue of a shoddy compilation is pretty much The Story Of The Who's Relationship With MCA/Decca.

One of my friends brought over the last Greta Van Fleet album last night. It's the silliest, most unnecessary gatefold I've ever seen. No cover art to speak of, some completely unremarkable and derivative art inside, and it's difficult to close properly.

Oh man, badly glued or badly cut gatefolds are the worst. That thing when you start closing them and you get this ugly bubble of card bulging up inside the fold

Very thin cardboard, too. Like cardstock.

In hindsight, it suited the contents perfectly.

The Battle At Garden's Gate(fold)