Budget albums (also known as unofficially by some collectors as either drugstore records or junk records) were low-priced vinyl LPs of popular and classical music released during the 1950s to 1970s consisting either of previously released material (usually reissues drawn from the catalogs of major labels featuring older performances by well-known artists) or material recorded especially for the line (often cover versions of hit songs by name artists sung or performed on these albums by usually unidentified and unknown musicians).
From the mid-1950s to the early 80s, Crown turned out hundreds of cheaply produced LPs of country, Hawaiian, Latin, and other musical genres; often performed by pseudonymous studio groups; as well as blues material reissued from the Modern label.
RCA Camden was particularly successful in repackaging older Elvis Presley recordings on the Camden label, as well as previously released and also unreleased material he recorded for his motion pictures, making these albums among the select few budget albums to actually make the national best-selling charts.
At one point, the Camden albums were doing so well that two of Presley's major hit singles of the early 1970s - "Burning Love" and "Separate Ways" (and their respective flipsides) made their album debuts not on mainstream RCA releases, but on RCA Camden.
Not long before Presley's death, RCA licensed its Camden line to Pickwick, though it eventually revived the label.
The budget albums' peak was in the late 1960s and early 1970s when nearly every recording artist of note had one or more such collections on the market.
The Music for Pleasure (MFP) label was founded in 1965 as a joint venture between EMI, which provided the source material, and the publisher Paul Hamlyn, which handled distribution in so-called non-traditional outlets, such as W.H.
In Venezuela (and arguably other Latin American countries)it was quite common to find these recordings in the Cassette format, which allowed for even cheaper and lower quantity of copies for each album issued.
Notable artists to have begun their careers recording for budget albums include Lou Reed, Jerry Cole,[8] Al Kooper and Tina Charles.