Arkhiv Populyarnoy Muzyki album series
Архив Популярной Музыки (Arkhiv Populyarnoy Muzyki, English: Archive of Popular Music) was a series of twelve long-playing vinyl records issued by the Soviet state label Melodiya (Мелодия) in 1988–1989. Each volume compiled key tracks from a single prominent figure in British and American pop and rock music of the 1950s to 1970s and included extensive liner notes detailing the artist’s creative history, a rarity in the USSR at the time. This made the series a significant window into Western music culture for Soviet listeners, who otherwise had very limited access to such information.
The cover art and visual identity of the series were created by designer Andrey Gusev, whose work unified the releases and distinguished them from both original Western album artwork and earlier Soviet compilations like the three-LP Rock Archive line from 1987, which used the same music and text but different covers. The series occupied a complex space in Soviet practice: although it carried a higher retail price framed as a “foreign license” premium, the recordings were sourced from private collections and pre-1973 masters under a legal regime that did not require international royalties, leading some contemporary historians to describe the releases as bootleg-like products of their era. For a more detailed history of the series, see Artur Netsvetaev’s article for Soviet Rock.
For the bilingual typography, Gusev used ITC Lubalin Graph in all-lowercase letters. The series title and number are added in Helion.
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