And indeed, from the label’s perspective it’s pretty straight forward. Lets hope the nice people love the album. On the very inner sleeve which oh-so-helpfully keeps dust off it, lets show ‘em loads more. Maybe they’ll buy these too? “Quick!” they’ll cry, “off to the record shop”…

Anybody who has spent any amount of time buying or looking for records will be familiar with the huge range of inner sleeves out there. And indeed, a brief shakedown of my record collection has come up with some interesting examples of inner sleeves from the past. Of course, you do have the generic label sleeves, decorated simply with the label’s logo - Philadelphia International produced a particularly pleasing example. But while clearly streets ahead of the plain white number, let’s face it, something like that doesn’t really try too hard to push the product.

Far more impressively, my copy of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On comes in a standard Motown inner sleeve of the time. As well as listing the various – mainly long forgotten – sub-labels they were using at the time, Black Forum, VIP, Chisa, it shows in numerical order, the covers of their recent albums. It’s mainly the people you’d expect – Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, the Four Tops, LPs that sit on your shelves and in the racks of thousands of record shops across the world. But then you notice the curiosities – who on earth were the ‘Hearts of Stone’? And should I have heard of Tom Clay? His LP (MW103L) ‘What the World Needs Now’ has a child’s drawing on the cover which – gulp – makes me a tad suspicious that there might be some kids singing on the album. Better leave this one where it is, you know, just in case. On the other hand, the wonderful array of covers on the inner sleeve that came with my Joe Bataan Sweet Soul LP on Fania Records makes me want to hit ebay just so I can prop the records up next to my stereo and pretend I’m living in Spanish Harlem while I cha cha cha. I don’t know that much about Willie Colon, but he is one cool looking dude.

Inner sleeves like these offer fascinating evidence of artists who have fallen straight through the cracks of our musical knowledge. On the Cadet inner sleeve from Ramsey Lewis’ Maiden Voyage, sure, we all know Ray Bryant and Marlena Shaw and Kenny Burrell, but does anybody ever listen to Jean DuShon’s Feeling Good? Or Don Goldie’s Trumpet Calliente? Possibly not, perhaps because they’re rubbish. But could it be that they’re great, like most of the Cadet back catalogue? We all know that Atlantic released some amazing records in the late sixties/early seventies, and a glimpse at an inner sleeve from this time reminds us just how many. Scarcely an unknown album or artist on there. Perhaps Cadet were equally consistent in their output, and these particular LPs have simply missed out on re-appraisal due to the wealth of talent elsewhere on the label.

It’s a reasonably well known fact that the immense mainstream success of the rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival gave Fantasy Records (and their sister labels Prestige and Milestone) the financial clout necessary to release jazz funk classics like Johnny Hammond’s Shifting Gears and the Three Pieces’ Vibes of Truth. And there they are, on an inner sleeve which must have penetrated – as if by stealth – many a hippy household in the seventies. Did the odd long-haired ‘head’, while rolling a ‘number’ on his copy of Creedence Gold, ever wonder what Accept No Substitutes or Gary Bartz sounded like? Let’s hope so. Though bearing in mind Fantasy Records actually sued John Forgerty for plagiarising one of his own songs (which they owned the rights to) after he’d left the label and went on to record elsewhere, maybe they aren’t quite so worthy of our admiration.

But anyway, in comparison, Buddah records clearly had a quality control issue - an innersleeve I found in an Isley Brothers album has albums like SuperFly and Black Ivory next to a Paul Anka compilation, I’m the Fiddleman by Papa John Creach, and several releases by the James Cotton band. If you’re wondering, I can confirm that the latter’s unique selling point appears to involve that most deadly of implements (out of the hands of Stevie Wonder of course) the harmonica. And the less said about the cover of the Calendar’s It’s a Monster LP the better, trust me.

Inner sleeves can be a lot more subtle than just plugging the covers of new releases though. In the seventies, Columbia experimented with a fanzine (the originally entitled, ‘The Inner Sleeve’), a series of brief and outrageously partisan articles on new artists and albums, many of whom you’ve still never heard of. To their credit though, I’ve just read a very brave piece about Captain Beefheart. Not the easiest sell in the world to be fair. CBS even offered mail order double LP compilations of new artists for little more than the price of postage. One rather disingenuously claims that the ‘boys in accounts’ would want to charge the good people more. Hmmm… Much more usefully, Blue Note did us all a favour with the ‘Definitive Catalogue’ accompanying the inner sleeves of some of their early seventies LPs. No pictures, but an alphabetical list of their artists (from Cannonball Adderley to Larry Young) complete with their releases and catalogue numbers. And, at this stage – 1971 – the act with the most Blue Note releases? Good old Jimmy Smith, though Horace Silver and Art Blakley were hot on his trail, and presumably eager to overtake.

And to really boost those profits, who can forget the classic, and now iconic ‘Home Taping is Killing Music’ motif, found with some albums from the early eighties? With a cassette and crossbones? I’m looking at one now – from an Otis Redding LP – and it is a fantastic piece of design. Pity the poor music industry, long before Napster, they had a pretty tough opponent on their hands - my parents taping my brother’s copy of ‘Thriller’ so we could both listen to it on our Walkmans on long family summer holidays. That must have had those label executives sweating in their Katherine Hamnett t-shirts.