Picture sleeves

The Paula Abdul thread made me realize how common picture sleeves had become in the 80s. Prior to that, they were quite rare, and generally limited to a label's top acts. It seems though that right around the '82/'83 "Hot Hits" era a large percentage of singles had them. Columbia even had custom ones for promo copies where the B side wasn't listed.
I'm guessing the reason for this was that this was an attempt to revive the sagging market for 45s by including a possible collector's item.

Actually, picture sleeves were quite common for '60s singles, but largely disappeared during most of the '70s. As mentioned, by the early '80s they were quite common again. By 1989 they started to die down, and were almost non-existant through the '90s.

45s still sold quite well at the beginning of the '80s, but by the middle part of the decade sales had declined. Fewer singles were certified gold in the last half of the '80s than in the first half. A lot of that likely had to do with the introduction of the cassette single.

In looking at what singles had sleeves and what didn't, there were some surprising omissions besides the Paula Abdul single.

For the record, I love picture sleeves. I've probably got close to 6,000 picture sleeve singles and am always on the hunt for more. My wife wonders where I'm going to put them all! :)

What was kind of maddening at the time was that when vinyl singles started to fall out of favor during the '90s, there were still a number of picture sleeves released promotionally only. Over the years I've found promo-only 45s with picture sleeves for acts like Black Crowes, Blind Melon, The Wonders and even a Beatles record. All were released in the '90s. The Black Crowes, Blind Melon and Wonders singles eventually came out as "stock" copies, but without the picture sleeves.