About

Album Cover Gifs / Animated Album Covers are a fanart meme in which fans of a band or type of music create endless GIF loop versions of the illustrations or photographs featured on the record cover. These types of GIFs have been collected by several single-topic-blogs.

Origin

On May 8th, 2010, a single topic blog on Tumblr called Animated Albums created and posted three endless GIF loops of popular albums, including David Bowie's Low, Blondie's Parallel Lines, and Grace Jones' Nightclubbing. Of the three, the Blondie received the most notes, with 750. Animated Albums continued to publish animated cover GIFs through 2013.

Spread

The meme went mainstream in October 2011, when the practice was adopted by the band R.E.M. as part of the promotional push for their "greatest hits" album, Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982–2011^[1].

jbetcom's music^[2], another single topic blog devoted to animating album covers, began publishing in October of 2013, around the same time as Animated Albums ended. Several articles have collected instances of the meme^[4]^[5]^[6], and a subreddit devoted to fans of the meme was founded in 2013 and has over 100 members.