A hype sticker is a promotional label affixed to the outer shrink wrap of a new product, often a vinyl record or CD, providing information about special features such as limited editions, bonus tracks, or notable endorsements, aiming to attract attention and increase sales. It serves as a quick, eye-catching summary of the product's unique selling points.
Often touted as a relatively controversial topic amongst record enthusiasts, the ‘hype sticker’ is something that has appeared on record sleeves since the mid-1960s when a designer named Craig Braun decided that physical music needed more visual appeal. Braun took it upon himself to design and create what would later go on to be recognised as the modern-day ‘hype sticker’. So, what is a ‘hype sticker’ anyway? We’re glad you asked.
Have you ever bought a new record and seen that it has some sort of promotional or informative sticker on the outside of the sleeve? Well, that is the hype sticker. Messages on these stickers can be incredibly diverse, ranging from things like “Includes the hit single…”, or even just stating what colour the record is (if it is indeed any other colour than black).
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A hype sticker does exactly what it says on the tin - it hypes up whatever record it is attached to, in order to create a buzz around it, which then of course (ideally) leads to increased sales. Hype stickers are pretty much commonplace amongst new records in today’s music market but were something of a rarity when the concept was first introduced, with not many record labels choosing to incorporate them into their albums’ final packaging design, due to the fear of them detracting from the album artwork itself.
It is this same reason why the preservation of a record’s hype sticker is so often debated today, as many hype stickers from the 60s onwards were stuck directly over the album artwork of a record’s sleeve, resulting in a potentially awkward and obscured image. You will, on the other hand, see record collectors who go to great lengths to carefully remove and transfer the hype stickers they find to other parts of the record’s housing (like its inner sleeve for example), in order to have an unobstructed view of the outer sleeve’s artwork, or even just to keep the sticker as a memento.
The fact that many of today’s new records come with plastic shrink-wrap means that many hype sticker collectors are having a slightly easier time transferring them to a new surface - whilst still preserving their album artwork, and keeping it from being potentially damaged or left with an odd-looking adhesive mark from where the sticker would once have been.
“If you had a sticker on the upper third of an LP’s shrink-wrap, it sold a lot more albums.”
Like the act of record collecting itself, hype sticker collecting is also a very prominent hobby within the physical music scene. Many collectors will hunt out specific releases of records, or even releases from different countries just to obtain a particular hype sticker. One of the rarer examples of an incredibly sought-after hype sticker are those of two very specific releases of The Beatles’ White Album. Each sticker takes up about a quarter of the size of the album’s cover and was released in both orange and white versions.
Each of these stickers simply states ‘The Beatles’ followed by the album’s track listing, but can fetch upwards of nine hundred dollars (per sticker, by the way) online - with this price increasing through the thousands if the correct issue of the album is included. These particular stickers were issued over the top of the album’s shrink wrap packaging, making them exceedingly valuable as not many albums from the late ‘60s have survived unopened until today.
With improvements in marketing techniques accelerating since the turn of the millennium, hype stickers are generally speaking pretty common on newer records - as now that records have made a dramatic comeback, there is a whole new generation to appeal to. The stickers themselves have evolved from being just text on a white label, to being full of colour and even sometimes, small images. In the world of modern-day marketing, it is so important to have your product stand out from others in the crowd, and that is and always has been the sole purpose of a hype sticker.
