Posted on November 07 2026
An original promotional poster is a poster printed to advertise something at the time it came out: a single, an album, a tour, a festival or a film. It was never made to be sold. It was made to sell something else, and it went up in record shop windows, on station walls, on bus shelters and inside cinemas for a few weeks before being replaced by the next campaign.
Who made them
Record companies, promoters and film distributors commissioned specialist printers to produce a run of posters for each campaign. The run was sized to the job: enough for the shops and sites that would display it, plus some spare. Once the campaign ended, the design was not reprinted. That finite run is what makes an original promotional poster different from anything printed later.
The two main formats
- Record shop posters, about 30 x 20 inches (76 x 51 cm). These went to music retailers to hang behind the counter or in the window when a release came out.
- Outdoor posters, 60 x 40 inches (152 x 102 cm). These were made for bus shelters, station concourses, airports and shopping centres, the sites known in the trade as Adshels. They were printed on tougher paper with weatherproof inks, and many have a blue back so they could be pasted over whatever was there before.
You will also find smaller formats such as display cards and flyers, but these two sizes make up most of what survives.
Where the surviving posters come from
Most posters that went on display were damaged when they came down, or simply thrown away. What survives in good condition is usually the extras: the spare copies from the original run, some still in their original packaging. Ours came from the fly-posting companies that worked alongside the record labels, distributors and film studios. It was a different era of promotion, when singles, albums, gigs and films were promoted through magazines and posters!
How it differs from a decorative print
A decorative print of a band photo or an album cover can be well made and still be a new product. It was designed to be sold as wall art, and it can be printed again whenever there is demand. An original promotional poster is a piece of the campaign itself. It carries the release date, the label, the tour venues or the cinema credits that mattered that week, and it exists in a fixed number.
What we stock
We specialise in original music posters from the 1990s and 2000s, from Britpop and indie to metal, rap, dance and pop, with film posters alongside. Oasis is the heart of the collection, including the 60 x 40 inch Knebworth 1996 poster. Many titles we hold are hard to find anywhere else because they came straight from the original print runs.