Albums Originally Held Multiple Records

Collections of recordings are called "albums" because early 78-rpm records usually held only one short song or recording per side. Longer works or groups of songs therefore required several discs, which were placed in individual sleeves bound together like pages in a photograph album. After LPs arrived in the late 1940s and allowed an entire collection to fit on one disc, the music industry retained the term. It later carried over to cassettes, CDs, and digital releases.

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